I shall be quite frank: even we have not attained the absolute,
exact solution of the problem of happiness. Twice a day, from
sixteen to seventeen o'clock and from twenty-one to twenty-two, our
united powerful organism dissolves into separate cells; these are
the personal hours designated by the Tables. During these hours
you would see the curtains discreetly drawn in the rooms of some;
others march slowly over the pavement of the main avenue or sit at
their desks as I sit now. But I firmly believe, let them call me
an idealist and a dreamer, I believe that sooner or later we shall
somehow find even for these hours, a place in the general formula.
Somehow, all of the 86,400 seconds will be incorporated in the
Tables of Hours.
I have had opportunity to read and hear many improbable things about
those times when human beings still lived in the state of freedom,
that is, an unorganized primitive state. One thing has always
seemed to me the most improbable: how could a government, even a
primitive government, permit people to live without anything like
our Tables,--without compulsory walks, without precise regulation
of the time to eat, for instance? They would get up and go to bed
whenever they liked. Some historians even say that in those days the
streets were lighted all night; and all night people went about the
streets.
That I cannot understand; true, their minds were rather limited in
those days. Yet they should have understood, should they not, that
such a life was actually wholesale murder, although slow murder,
day after day? The State (humanitarianism) forbade in those days the
murder of one person, but it did not forbid the killing of millions
slowly and by half. To kill one, that is, to reduce the general
sum of human life by fifty years, was considered criminal, but to
reduce the general sum of human life by fifty million years was not
considered criminal! Is it not droll? Today this simple mathematical
moral problem could easily be solved in half a minute's time by any
ten-year-old Number, yet _they_ couldn't do it! All their Immanuel
Kants together couldn't do it! It didn't enter the heads of all
their Kants to build a system of scientific ethics, that is, ethics
based on adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.
Further, is it not absurd that their State (they called it State!)
left sexual life absolutely without control? However, whenever and
as much as they wanted.... Absolutely unscientific like beasts; and
like beasts they blindly gave birth to children! Is it not strange
to understand gardening, chicken-farming, fishery (we have definite
knowledge that they were familiar with all these things), and not
to be able to reach the last step in this logical scale, namely,
production of children,--not to be able to discover such things as
Maternal and Paternal Norms?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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