And still, all the time, even in the vulgar uneducated--perhaps
more in them than in the hearty money-makers of the lower
middle-classes--throb-throb-throb goes the godurge deep in their souls,
driving them almost mad. They are quite stone-deaf to any new meaning.
They would jeer an attempt at a new interpretation, jeer it to death. So
there they are, between the rocky Scylla of the fixed, established
ideal, and the whirling Charybdis of the conservative opposition to this
ideal. Between these two perils they must pass. For behind them drives
the unknown current of the god-urge, on, on through the straits.
They will never get through the straits. They do not know that there
_is_ any getting through. Scylla must beat Charybdis, and Charybdis must
beat Scylla. So the monster of humanity, with a Scylla of an ideal of
equality for the head, and a Charybdis of industrialism and possessive
conservatism for the tail, howls with frenzy, and lashes the straits
till every boat goes down, that tries to make a passage.
Well, Scylla must have it out with Charybdis, that’s all, and we must
wait outside the straits till the storm is over.
It won’t be over yet, though.
Now this is the state of the mass. It is driven, goaded mad at length by
the pricking of the God-urge which it will not, cannot attend to or
interpret. It is so goaded that it is mad with its own wrongs. It is
wronged, so wronged that it is mad.
And what is the wrong, pray? The mass doesn’t know. There is no
connection at all between the burning, throbbing unconscious soul and
the clear-as-daylight conscious mind. The whole of Labour, to-day, sees
the situation clear as daylight. So does the whole of Capital. And yet
the whole of the daylight situation has really nothing to do with it. It
is the god-urge which drives them mad, the unacknowledged, unadmitted,
non-existent god-urge.
They may become a mob. A mob is like a mass of bullocks driven to frenzy
by some bott-fly, and charging frantically against the tents of some
herdsman, imagining that all the evil comes out of these tents. There is
a gulf between the quivering hurt in the unconscious soul, and the
round, flat world of the visible existence. A sense of weakness and
injury, at last an intolerable sense of wrong, turning to a fiendish
madness. A mad necessity to wreck something, cost what it may. For only
the flat, round, visible world exists.
And yet it is the bott-fly of the Holy Ghost, unlistened to, that is the
real cause of everything.
But the mob has no direction even in its destructive lust. The vengeful
masses _have_ direction. And it is no good trying to reason with them.
The mass does not act by reason. A mass is not even formed by reason.
The more intense or extended the _collective_ consciousness, the more
does the truly reasonable, individual consciousness sink into abeyance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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