The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (29 page)

“It had to be one of two things. Either man was naturally bad, so that all natural qualities were
naturally perverted
, or the perversion resulted from humanity’s long exposure to an atmosphere of social fictions that engendered tyranny, so that the natural use of man’s most
natural qualities came to be instinctively tyrannical. Which of these two hypotheses was the right one? It was impossible to determine in a satisfactory—that is, strictly logical or scientific—way. Logical reasoning cannot apply here, since the problem is historical, or scientific, and depends on knowing the
facts
. Science can’t help us either, since no matter how far back we go in history, we always find man living under some system of social tyranny, so that we cannot know what man is like, or would be like, in completely natural circumstances. Since we have no way to determine which hypothesis is correct, we must opt for the one that’s more probable: the second one. To suppose that natural qualities can be naturally perverted is in a certain way contradictory. It’s more natural to suppose that humanity’s long exposure to tyranny-engendering social fictions has caused our natural qualities to be perverted, from birth, by a spontaneous tendency to tyrannize, even when we have no wish to tyrannize. And so the thinker will decide as I decided, with near absolute certainty, in favor of this second hypothesis.

“One thing is clear. In our present social condition, no group of men, no matter how well meaning and how dedicated they are to fighting social fictions and working for freedom, can work together without spontaneously creating a tyranny in their own midst, without adding a new tyranny to that of social fictions, without destroying in practice what they want in theory, without involuntarily but fatally hindering the very goal they’re striving for. So what do we do? It’s simple.... We all work for the same goal,
but separately
.

“Separately?!”

“That’s right. Didn’t you follow my argument?”

“Yes.”

“And doesn’t this strike you as a logical, inevitable conclusion?”

“Yes, I suppose so.... What I don’t get is how this....”

“Let me clarify. ... I said: We all work for the same goal, but separately. If we’re all working for the same anarchist goal, each of us will be contributing with his efforts toward the destruction of social fictions and the creation of the free society of the future. Working separately, we’ll never restrict another man’s freedom by dominating him nor stifle
his freedom by helping him, since we won’t be acting on one another at all, and so we cannot possibly create a new tyranny.

“By working separately for the same anarchist goal, we have the advantage of a joint effort without the disadvantage of creating a new tyranny. We’re still morally united, because we share a common goal, and we’re still anarchists, because each of us works for the free society. But we stop being willing or unwilling traitors to our cause, and we can’t even possibly be traitors, since by working for anarchism on our own, individually, we’re not subject to the harmful influence of social fictions via their hereditary effect on the qualities that Nature gave us.

“This strategy only applies, of course, to what I called the
preparatory stage
for the social revolution. Once bourgeois resistance has been demolished and all society reduced to the point of accepting anarchist doctrines, with only the social revolution still lacking, then, for that final strike, we can no longer act separately. But at that point the free society will have virtually arrived; things will already be vastly different. The strategy of working separately is for promoting anarchism within a bourgeois context, as now, or as when I and my comrades formed our group.

“Here at last was the true anarchist method! Together we accomplished practically nothing, and on top of that we tyrannized each other, thereby obstructing our freedom and our theories. Separately we also wouldn’t achieve much, but at least we wouldn’t obstruct freedom or create a new tyranny; the little we achieved would be a real achievement, without collateral loss or damage. And by working separately, we would learn to be more self-reliant, not to lean so much on each other, to become already freer, thus preparing ourselves—as well as others, by our example—for the future.

“This discovery made me ecstatic. I went and shared it immediately with my comrades.... It’s one of the few times in my life when I was plain stupid. I was so thrilled with my discovery that I expected them to receive it with open arms!”

“Which of course they didn’t do....”

“They caviled and quibbled, every last one of them! Some were more vocal than others, but they all objected.... ‘That can’t be right!
It doesn’t make sense!’... But no one could say what was right, or what would make sense. I argued myself green, and in reply to my arguments all I got were cliches, gibberish, the kinds of things ministers say in parliaments when they have no answers.... That’s when I realized what kind of ninnies and cowards I was involved with! They had shown their true colors. The whole lot had been born to be slaves. They wanted to be anarchists at someone else’s expense. They wanted freedom, as long as other people went and got it for them, as long as it was handed to them like a title from the king! Virtually all of them were lackeys at heart!”

“And did you get angry?”

“Angry? I was furious! I started ranting and raving, and I almost came to blows with a couple of them. Finally I stormed out. I kept to myself. I was so disgusted with that herd of namby-pambies that you can’t imagine! I almost quit believing in anarchism. I almost decided to just forget about it all. But after a few days I came back to my senses. I realized that the anarchist ideal was above all that bickering. If they didn’t want to be anarchists, I could still be one. If they just wanted to play at being libertarians, I wasn’t about to join them. If the only way they knew how to fight was by hanging on each other and creating a new version of the tyranny they said they wanted to destroy, then they could jolly well do it on their own, the fools. But that was no reason for me to be a bourgeois.

“It had become clear to me that in true anarchism each man must call on his own strength to create freedom and to fight social fictions. So I would call on my own strength to do just that. No one wanted to follow me on the true path of anarchism? Then I’d follow it alone. I’d fight social fictions all by myself, relying on my own faith and resources, deprived even of the moral support of those who had been my comrades. I don’t claim that this was a noble or heroic gesture. It was simply a natural gesture. If the path had to be followed by each man separately, then I needed no one else to follow it. My ideal was enough. It was with these principles and in these circumstances that I decided to fight social fictions all by myself.”

He broke off his speech, which had become a fervid stream. When he resumed a few moments later, it was with a calmer voice.

* * *

“It’s war, I thought, between me and social fictions. So what can I do to defeat them? I’ll work alone so as not to create any tyranny, but how can I, by myself, help pave the way for the social revolution and prepare humanity for the free society? I would have to choose one of two methods, unless, of course, I could use both. The two methods were: indirect action, which amounts to propagandizing, and direct action of one sort or another.

“I first of all considered indirect action, or propagandizing. What sort of propagandizing could I do on my own? Beyond the sort of propagandizing we do when we talk with this person or that person, taking advantage of the random opportunities that come our way, was indirect action a path by which I could actively practice anarchism, in such a way as to produce visible results? I immediately saw that it wasn’t. I’m not a speaker or a writer. I mean, I can speak in public if I have to, and I’m capable of writing a newspaper article, but I had to determine if my natural bent was such that, by specializing in either of these forms of indirect action, I could obtain better results for the anarchist cause than by devoting my efforts to some other form of action. The fact is that direct action is generally more effective than propagandizing, the only exception being for those individuals who by nature are destined to be propagandists—the great public speaker, who is capable of electrifying crowds and making them follow his lead, or the great writer, who can captivate and convince people through his books. I don’t think I’m especially vain, but if I am, I at least don’t boast about qualities I don’t have. And, as I’ve said, I’ve never considered myself a speaker or writer. That’s why I gave up on the idea of indirect action as a viable path for my anarchist activities. I was left, by elimination, with the path of direct action, in which my efforts would be applied to actual practice, to real life. The path of action instead of the intelligence. That’s how it had to be. Fine.

“I needed to apply to practical life what I had learned to be the basic method of anarchist action: to struggle against social fictions without engendering a new tyranny and to begin to create, if possible, the freedom of the future. But how the devil could this be done in practice?

“What, in practice, does it mean to struggle? To struggle, in practice, implies war, or at least
a
war. How can war be waged against social fictions? Let’s first consider how any war is waged. How can the enemy in a war be conquered? In one of two ways. The enemy can either be killed—destroyed, that is—or else imprisoned, subdued, reduced to inactivity. It wasn’t in my power to
destroy
social fictions; that could only be accomplished by the social revolution. Until that happened, social fictions might be shaken up to the point where they’d hang by a thread, but only the downfall of bourgeois society and the advent of a free society could actually
destroy
them. The most I could have done in the way of actual destruction was to kill one or more representative members of bourgeois society. I thought about it and realized it would be folly. Suppose I killed one or two or even a dozen representatives of the tyranny of social fictions. Would that help to undermine social fictions? Not at all. Social fictions are not like political situations, which can depend on a small number of men, sometimes on just one man. Social fictions are bad in themselves and not because of their representative members, who are bad only insofar as they represent social fictions.

“Then too, assaults on the social order always spark a reaction, such that things not only don’t improve, they may actually get worse. And suppose, as is probable, that I were arrested after making an assault-arrested and liquidated, in one way or another. And suppose I had finished off with a dozen capitalists. What would be the end result? With my liquidation—even if that meant, not my death, but incarceration or banishment—the anarchist cause would lose one of its fighting constituents, whereas the twelve capitalists that I had laid flat would not signify a loss of twelve constituents of bourgeois society, which is made up not of fighting constituents but of purely passive ones; the ‘fight’ isn’t against the members of bourgeois society but against the body of social fictions on which that society is founded. Social fictions are not people at whom we can fire shots.... Do you see my point? It wouldn’t be like the soldier of one army killing twelve soldiers from an enemy army; it would be like a soldier killing twelve civilians from the nation defended by an
enemy army. It would mean killing stupidly, since no combatant would be eliminated....

“It was useless to think of
destroying
social fictions, whether in whole or in any one part. Instead I would have to conquer them by subduing and reducing them to inactivity.”

He pointed his right index finger straight at me:

“So that’s what I did!”

Dropping his finger, he continued:

“I considered which was the first and foremost social fiction, since that was the one I felt most duty-bound to subdue and to reduce, if possible, to inactivity. The foremost social fiction, at least in our own time, is money. Now how could I subdue money or, more precisely, the power of money, its tyranny? By becoming free of its influence and thus superior to it, making it inactive as far as I was concerned. As far as I was concerned, please understand, since I was the one who was fighting it. To make it inactive as far as all humanity was concerned would mean not just subduing it but
destroying
it, since the fiction of money would cease to exist. But I’ve already proven to you that any social fiction can be destroyed only by the social revolution, which will bring them all down, along with bourgeois society.

“How could I be superior to the power of money? The simplest method would be to withdraw from the sphere of its influence, that is, from civilization; to go to the wilderness and eat roots and drink stream water; to be naked and live like an animal. But this method, even if it posed no practical difficulties, wouldn’t be a method for fighting a social fiction, because there’s no fighting in it, just fleeing. Those who shy from the battle are not defeated physically, but they are defeated morally, because they didn’t fight. No, I had to adopt another method—a method of fighting, not of fleeing. How could I subdue money by fighting against it? How could I free myself from its influence and its tyranny without running away from it? The only possible method was to
acquire
it, to acquire enough of it so as not to feel its influence; and the more I acquired, the freer from its influence I would be. It was when I clearly saw this, with all the force of my anarchist convictions and all the logic
of my clear-thinking mind, that I entered the current phase—the banking and business phase—of my anarchism.”

He rested for a moment from the renewed fervor and vehemence of his arguments. Then he went on, in a still somewhat heated tone:

“Remember those two logical problems that occurred to me at the beginning of my career as a conscious anarchist? ... And do you remember how I resolved them artificially, through sentimentality rather than through logic? In fact it was you who pointed out, quite correctly, that I hadn’t dealt with those problems logically.”