Society And its Purpose
Book 4 - Psychological Laws and the End of Civil Societies
CHAPTER 18
Continuation — Another error of politicians who support movement
662. From absurd theories political authors who support movement can only draw even more absurd practical consequences and at the same time disastrous for society. Having confused good, well-ordered progress with movement of any kind, they inevitably conclude that all means are good if they help to move and stimulate society.
I have no doubt that evils and unfulfilled needs sometimes excite movement and stimulation in the human spirit and in human actions. But no rule of government could be more strange and contradictory than that which requires the needs of citizens to remain unfulfilled in order to keep society in continual motion! This political doctrine is as absurd as that of medical science which claimed as the best rule of medicine the promotion of continual, orderless and unmeasured movements in the human body, simply because observation reveals that life consists in ceaseless motion or in an incessant movement accompanying life. Nevertheless we should not be surprised if political theorists refuse to disown these consequences; they do in fact teach openly everything I have said. The following is how one of our authors requires government to make progress in social civilisation:
| The primary means for furthering the civilisation of a country consist in increasing the intensity and quantity of needs, and the knowledge of the objects which satisfy these needs. The sum of desires is always greater than the total of the objects acquired. Consequently, increasing desires keeps human beings in a constant state of hunger, which then become a cause of perpetual motion.(297) |
663. We see here how perpetual motion is considered almost synonymous with progress towards civilisation. Everything is achieved, it seems, by striving to promote perpetual motion, without the least effort to define the quality and quantity of the movement itself. We also see in this system how contentment of spirit counts for nothing; only transitory sensations are considered valuable. This is a consequence of all sensist systems. No spirit exists when the total human being is reduced to corporeal feelings; it is impossible therefore to find the desirable state of spirit which I have defined as contentment.
664. This doctrine directly contradicts good, common sense which has always judged human beings unhappy in proportion to their unfulfilled desires.
Furthermore, it contains all that is base and immoral. Just as virtue brings peace of spirit and moderates desires, so vice causes unrest and immoderate desires. Virtue values habitual contentment of state as a stable good, whereas vice seeks transitory, intense and often tumultuous sensations which leave the spirit full of bitterness and blind wishes that continually recur independently of the will.
The politics of movement, as formulated in the principle: `government must strive to increase unfulfilled needs so that a painful state is always present to stimulate human beings to perpetual motion', goes hand in glove with vice and excludes virtue as useless, even harmful, to the State solely because virtue generates tranquillity and peace.
Finally, the doctrine is far too inhuman and cruel; it tortures human beings for the miserable pleasure of seeing them move. Political theorists supporting it can fittingly be likened to cruel children who take great delight in hitting, wounding and dismembering some tiny animal; they want to see it twitch convulsively in response to their blows and slashes, and finally die after a succession of long, drawn-out tortures.
(297) M. Gioia, Prospetto delle Scienze Economiche. - This principle of Gioia contradicts his other principle that `physical sensitivity can be considered as a constant quantity', if we remember that in his sensistic system every need pertains to physical feeling.