American essays -- 20th century; State, The; World War, 1914-1918
From members of this class a certain insuperable indignation arises
if the change from private enterprise to State service involves any
real loss of power and personal privilege. If there is to be pragmatic
sacrifice, let it be, they feel, on the field of honor, in the
traditionally acclaimed deaths by battle, in that detour to suicide,
as Nietzsche calls war. The State in wartime supplies satisfaction
for this very real craving, but its chief value is the opportunity it
gives for this regression to infantile attitudes. In your reaction to
an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you
draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed,
and you insist vehemently that everybody else shall think, speak and
act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a
truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock, the quasi-personal
symbol of the strength of the herd, and the leader and determinant of
your definite action and ideas.
The members of the working-classes, that portion at least which does
not identify itself with the significant classes and seek to imitate
it and rise to it, are notoriously less affected by the symbolism of
the State, or, in other words, are less patriotic than the significant
classes. For theirs is neither the power nor the glory. The State in
wartime does not offer them the opportunity to regress, for, never
having acquired social adulthood, they cannot lose it. If they have
been drilled and regimented, as by the industrial régime of the last
century, they go out docilely enough to do battle for their State, but
they are almost entirely without that filial sense and even without
that herd-intellect sense which operates so powerfully among their
“betters.” They live habitually in an industrial serfdom, by which
though nominally free, they are in practice as a class bound to a
system of machine-production the implements of which they do not own,
and in the distribution of whose product they have not the slightest
voice, except what they can occasionally exert by a veiled intimidation
which draws slightly more of the product in their direction. From such
serfdom, military conscription is not so great a change. But into the
military enterprise they go, not with those hurrahs of the significant
classes whose instincts war so powerfully feeds, but with the same
apathy with which they enter and continue in the industrial enterprise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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