The man of faith and The man of force
Table of Contents
With very rare and brief exceptions, pre-capitalist societies had no place for creativity.
Reason and its practical expression—free trade—were forbidden as a sin and a crime, or were tolerated, usually as ignoble activities, under the control of authorities who could revoke the tolerance at whim.
Such societies were ruled by faith and its practical expression: force. There were no makers of knowledge and no makers of wealth; there were only witch doctors and tribal chiefs.
These two figures dominate every anti-rational period of history, whether one calls them tribal chief and witch doctor—or absolute monarch and religious leader—or dictator and logical positivist.
The tragic joke of human history is that on any of the altars men erected, it was always man whom they immolated and the animal whom they enshrined.
It was always the animal’s attributes, not man’s, that humanity worshipped: the idol of instinct and the idol of force—the mystics and the kings—the mystics, who longed for an irresponsible consciousness and ruled by means of the claim that their dark emotions were superior to reason, that knowledge came in blind, causeless fits, blindly to be followed, not doubted—and the kings, who ruled by means of claws and muscles, with conquest as their method and looting as their aim, with a club or a gun as sole sanction of their power.
The defenders of man’s soul were concerned with his feelings, and the defenders of man’s body were concerned with his stomach—but both were united against his mind.
These are 2 figures:
- The man of faith
- The man of force
These are philosophical archetypes, psychological symbols and historical reality.
As philosophical archetypes, they embody two variants of a certain view of man and of existence. As psychological symbols, they represent the basic motivation of a great many men who exist in any era, culture or society. As historical reality, they are the actual rulers of most of mankind’s societies, who rise to power whenever men abandon reason.
The essential characteristics of these two remain the same in all ages: Attila, the man who rules by brute force, acts on the range of the moment, is concerned with nothing but the physical reality immediately before him, respects nothing but man’s muscles, and regards a fist, a club or a gun as the only answer to any problem—and the Witch Doctor, the man who dreads physical reality, dreads the necessity of practical action, and escapes into his emotions, into visions of some mystic realm where his wishes enjoy a supernatural power unlimited by the absolute of nature.
Superficially, these two may appear to be opposites, but observe what they have in common: a consciousness held down to the perceptual method of functioning, an awareness that does not choose to extend beyond the automatic, the immediate, the given, the involuntary, which means: an animal’s “epistemology” or as near to it as a human consciousness can come. Man’s consciousness shares with animals the first two stages of its development: sensations and perceptions; but it is the third state, conceptions, that makes him man. Sensations are integrated into perceptions automatically, by the brain of a man or of an animal. But to integrate perceptions into conceptions by a process of abstraction, is a feat that man alone has the power to perform— and he has to perform it by choice.
The process of abstraction, and of conceptformation is a process of reason, of thought; it is not automatic nor instinctive nor involuntary nor infallible. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results. The pre-conceptual level of consciousness is nonvolitional; volition begins with the first syllogism. Man has the choice to think or to evade—to maintain a state of full awareness or to drift from moment to moment, in a semi-conscious daze, at the mercy of whatever associational whims the unfocused mechanism of his consciousness produces. But the living organisms that possess the faculty of consciousness need to exercise it in order to survive. An animal’s consciousness functions automatically; an animal perceives what it is able to perceive and survives accordingly, no further than the perceptual level permits and no better. Man cannot survive on the perceptual level of his consciousness; his senses do not provide him with an automatic guidance, they do not give him the knowledge he needs, only the material of knowledge, which his mind has to integrate. Man is the only living species who has to perceive reality—which means: to be conscious—by choice. But he shares with other species the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. For an animal, the question of survival is primarily physical; for man, primarily epistemological.
Man’s unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. If a drought strikes them, animals perish—man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish—man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them animals perish—man writes the Constitution of the United States. But one does not obtain food, safety or freedom—by instinct.
It is against this faculty, the faculty of reason, that Attila and the Witch Doctor rebel. The key to both their souls is their longing for the effortless, irresponsible, automatic consciousness of an animal. Both dread the necessity, the risk and the responsibility of rational cognition. Both dread the fact that “nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” Both seek to exist, not by conquering nature, but by adjusting to the given, the immediate, the known. There is only one means of survival for those who do not choose to conquer nature: to conquer those who do.
The physical conquest of men is Attila’s method of survival. He regards men as others regard fruit trees or farm animals: as objects in nature, his for the seizing. But while a good farmer knows, at least, that fruit trees and animals have a specific nature and require a specific kind of handling, the perceptual mentality of Attila does not extend to so abstract a level: men, to him, are a natural phenomenon and an irreducible primary, as all natural phenomena are irreducible primaries to an animal.
Attila feels no need to understand, to explain, nor even to wonder, how men manage to produce the things he covets —“somehow” is a fully satisfactory answer inside his skull, which refuses to consider such questions as “how?” and “why?” or such concepts as identity and causality. All he needs, his “urges” tell him, is bigger muscles, bigger clubs or a bigger gang than theirs in order to seize their bodies and their products, after which their bodies will obey his commands and will provide him, somehow, with the satisfaction of any whim. He approaches men as a beast of prey, and the consequences of his actions or the possibility of exhausting his victims never enters his consciousness, which does not choose to extend beyond the given moment. His view of the universe does not include the power of production. The power of destruction, of brute force, is, to him, metaphysically omnipotent.
An Attila never thinks of creating, only of taking over. Whether he conquers a neighboring tribe or overruns a continent, material looting is his only goal and it ends with the act of seizure: he has no other purpose, no plan, no system to impose on the conquered, no values. His pleasures are closer to the level of sensations than of perceptions: food, drink, palatial shelter, rich clothing, indiscriminate sex, contests of physical prowess, gambling—all those activities which do not demand or involve the use of the conceptual level of consciousness. He does not originate his pleasures: he desires and pursues whatever those around him seem to find desirable. Even in the realm of desires, he does not create, he merely takes over.
But a human being cannot live his life moment by moment; a human consciousness preserves a certain continuity and demands a certain degree of integration, whether a man seeks it or not. A human being needs a frame of reference, a comprehensive view of existence, no matter how rudimentary, and, since his consciousness is volitional, a sense of being right, a moral justification of his actions, which means: a philosophical code of values. Who, then, provides Attila with values? The Witch Doctor.
If Attila’s method of survival is the conquest of those who conquer nature, the Witch Doctor’s method of survival is safer, he believes, and spares him the risks of physical conflict. His method is the conquest of those who conquer those who conquer nature. It is not men’s bodies that he seeks to rule, but men’s souls.
To Attila, as to an animal, the phenomena of nature are an irreducible primary. To the Witch Doctor, as to an animal, the irreducible primary is the automatic phenomena of his own consciousness.