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Society And its Purpose

Book 4 - Psychological Laws and the End of Civil Societies

CHAPTER 29

Political harm arising from unsatisfied capacities

800. We have listed the unsatisfiable capacities and seen the ferocity to which they can rise when provoked. We still have to consider the gravity and incurability of the harm they inflict on human society.

801. First, they go so far as to destroy the end of society, which is simply contentment of spirit.(348) Nothing is more contrary to wise, civil government, therefore, than arousing in subjects the states of disquiet and unhappiness we have enumerated; nothing is more in keeping with wise, civil government than removing from society those occasions which give rise to the useless opening of unfulfillable capacities. On the contrary, what is needed is intense application to obtaining the conditions necessary for contentment.

802. This radical evil, which strikes at the very life of society by impeding the end for which it exists, is not alone in inflicting harm on society. Other public evils arise indirectly from the unsatisfied capacities of its members. The following are the principal:

1. People torn apart by unsatisfiable capacities necessarily form false judgments about the happy or unhappy state of others.

These false judgments are harmful to society to the degree that those holding them influence society. There are two principal false judgments about the happiness or unhappiness of others. The first consists in judging that all good, everything that can bring people nearer the state of happiness, is found in the objects of people’s own capacities. Those who judge in this way measure public happiness by the number of objects corresponding to people’s capacities. Examples of this are the quantity of pleasure, wealth, and so on.

The second false judgment consists in judging that all evil consists in a lack of objects proper to people’s capacities. According to this judgment, the least suffering undergone by the senses, the least possible poverty, and so on, are the things that produce the happiest nation.

803. Consequently, if love of pleasure, for example, or vanity, but above all the final cupidity of movement, is dominant, a curious kind of prejudice will arise leading practically everyone to judge that public happiness consists and increases in proportion to the instability of forms and to the speed given to all social movements. In other words, instability and speed seem to contribute power to the spirit and to stimulate life. In this state, no credence will be given to sober, virtuous individuals who maintain that they are content with their modest way of life — their severe way of life, as their contemporaries will call it.

These individuals are either cursed as hypocrites, or at best deplored as crazy and abhorred for their stubbornness and obstinacy. At the same time, politicians believe themselves great benefactors if they succeed in preventing citizens from contenting themselves with a sparse, decent life. Nonetheless, these great politicians, whose refined sensitivity is disturbed by the serene, moderate spirit of the citizens they govern, sometimes confess their own unhappiness, and often feel a void in their hearts which they vainly try to fill by continually increasing the cupidities which produce it.

804. 2. Granted the presence of many people without peace because of the unsatisfiable capacities opened in them, the natural motion of society is disturbed. Here we can observe the rapidity of social movement and the instability and speed seem to contribute power to the spirit and to stimulate life. In this state, no credence will be given to sober, virtuous individuals who maintain that they are content with their modest way of life — their severe way of life, as their contemporaries will call it. These individuals are either cursed as hypocrites, or at best deplored as crazy and abhorred for their stubbornness and obstinacy.obstacles society finds in this movement. The rapidity has its origin in the desired object to which society is drawn or in the hated object at which it balks.

All one hundred and twenty-eight cupidities produce movement of the first kind (movement towards a term) because of the imaginary object that attracts them. The final cupidity produces the second kind of movement (movement from a term), according to which people tend to flee without having any object to which they can move. The right degree of speed in social movement must be defined by reason alone, which prescribes its varying velocity either according to circumstances or according to the calculation of the effects, with reference to their total utility. On the other hand, unenlightened passions hasten uncontrollably to their aim, and senselessly add to the quantity of movement judged suitable by calm reason. We can, therefore, say with certainty that `the cause accelerating all movement in society is the degree of total unhappiness.’

805. As a machine breaks down and disintegrates when its different movements are driven in a way foreign to its nature and construction, so too the social order is endangered when unhappy disquiet in spirits throws everything into great agitation. However, while the other cupidities provide too fast a movement and harm different parts of the social machine, the final cupidity has as its immediate, proper effect that of radically disturbing society.

806. The obstacles encountered by rapid movement are the most efficacious, immediate cause of the disintegration of society. These obstacles, standing in the way of inflamed spirits, are of two kinds. One is made up of obstacles springing from the essential impossibility of contentment. This makes people habitually unhappy and puts them in a permanent state of anger. The degree of this anger depends for its intensity on the extent and aggravation experienced by the empty capacity that makes people miserable. The other springs from the impossibility of increasing the objects of the capacities in proportion to the growing extent of the capacities themselves. The result is an ever-increasing lack of objects, which inevitably leads people to express themselves in all kinds of ways: novelty, eccentricity, barbarity, exaggeration and frenetic undertakings become the order of the day. From this point of view, there is some truth in the words of the sophist who wrote not long before the French revolution:

— which they did. In the second half of the last century, the arts and science were also convulsed by frenetic movements during a period very like that of the Greek sophists: literature was tainted by it — a black, bloody tint ensured a place in humane literature for descriptions of unhappiness and wrong-doing, and nothing more [App. no. 12]. Peace and rest are impossible for a society in which movement, mere movement, has become the supreme need. This need is one of those secret reasons which alone explain certain social revolutions that would otherwise remain a mystery.(350)

807. 3. The essentially unhappy condition of people in whom unsatisfiable capacities dominate gives rise to extremely harmful theories in right and politics.

Individuals ruled by passion have two characteristics: an indefinite hope consisting in their imagining that they can bring about their own contentment with absurd means; and continual anger at seeing themselves thwarted in all their efforts which, however, they never tire of repeating with ever-growing vehemence. The first of these characteristics gives birth to unlimited presumption which believes that all things are possible for human beings, especially government to which, therefore, are allocated all the ills that fall upon society. The second characteristic produces maximum agitation, a tendency towards universal harshness and hostility.

Consequently, we find:

1. An inclination to destroy every principle of equity on the basis of a claim that everything is founded on strictest right.

2. An inclination to construct for oneself a claimed right, entirely to the advantage of one’s own interests and passions. No ground is given here; rights are defended ferociously and written on the barrels of guns.

3. An inclination to believe that government, with this code in hand, can do as it pleases for the sake of the majority or for common utility.

Such are the founts of the public right which comes to the fore at times when these unsatisfiable cupidities are opened and agitated in the human spirit.

808. People should not deceive themselves that the monarchical form of government is safe from such vices because, as they boast, it has honour as its support. But of what use is the monarchical form if society does not attain its end? — Monarchy without happiness is useless. Even if it were true that a monarchical constitution would not be directly endangered by numerous ambitious, avaricious and lustful people, and so on, it still could not avoid the three evils which, as we indicated, inevitably arise from such dispositions of spirit. Honour itself, this imaginary support of absolute governments, is another Proteus ready to change forms and object in accordance with ways of life. What is honour if it is accompanied by corruption rather than integrity, by vice rather than virtue?

809. We conclude, therefore, with this extremely important rule: `Those political means are best which aim at keeping the human faculties of thought and abstraction in their natural equilibrium, and thus impede human beings from claiming to satiate the general capacities of their spirits with particular objects.’

Notes

(348) Chapter 1.

(349) Rousseau, Réponse au Roi de Pologne, etc., towards the end.

(350) The fall of the first-born branch of the Bourbons is attributed to its incapacity for providing suitable nourishment to French activity which, devoid of an object, finally burst over the head of State (Cf. Conny's booklet, De l'avenir de la France). — Going a little further back, we would have to say that the Bourbons had no idea of how to prevent the disordered development of so-called French activity, and direct public affairs towards the contentment of spirits. Instead, they co-operated in extending those infinite, unsatisfiable capacities of the heart (as we have called them) which lead society, and humanity itself, to a convulsive death.

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