Freud - Complete Works (717 page)

The Future Of An Illusion

4423

   These earliest instinctual
renunciations already involve a psychological factor which remains
important for all further instinctual renunciations as well. It is
not true that the human mind has undergone no development since the
earliest times and that, in contrast to the advances of science and
technology, it is the same to-day as it was at the beginning of
history. We can point out one of these mental advances at once. It
is in keeping with the course of human development that external
coercion gradually becomes internalized; for a special mental
agency, man’s super-ego, takes it over and includes it among
its commandments. Every child presents this process of
transformation to us; only by that means does it become a moral and
social being. Such a strengthening of the super-ego is a most
precious cultural asset in the psychological field. Those in whom
it has taken place are turned from being opponents of civilization
into being its vehicles. The greater their number is in a cultural
unit the more secure is its culture and the more it can dispense
with external measures of coercion. Now the degree of this
internalization differs greatly between the various instinctual
prohibitions. As regards the earliest cultural demands, which I
have mentioned, the internalization seems to have been very
extensively achieved, if we leave out of account the unwelcome
exception of the neurotics. But the case is altered when we turn to
the other instinctual claims. Here we observe with surprise and
concern that a majority of people obey the cultural prohibitions on
these points only under the pressure of external coercion - that
is, only where that coercion can make itself effective and so long
as it is to be feared. This is also true of what are known as the
moral
demands of civilization, which likewise apply to
everyone. Most of one’s experiences of man’s moral
untrustworthiness fall into this category. There are countless
civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest but who do
not deny themselves the satisfaction of their avarice, their
aggressive urges or their sexual lusts, and who do not hesitate to
injure other people by lies, fraud and calumny, so long as they can
remain unpunished for it; and this, no doubt, has always been so
though many ages of civilization.

The Future Of An Illusion

4424

   If we turn to those restrictions
that apply only to certain classes of society, we meet with a state
of things which is flagrant and which has always been recognized.
It is to be expected that these underprivileged classes will envy
the favoured ones their privileges and will do all they can to free
themselves from their own surplus of privation. Where this is not
possible, a permanent measure of discontent will persist within the
culture concerned and this can lead to dangerous revolts. If,
however, a culture has not got beyond a point at which the
satisfaction of one portion of its participants depends upon the
suppression of another, and perhaps larger, portion - and this is
the case in all present day cultures - it is understandable that
the suppressed people should develop an intense hostility towards a
culture whose existence they make possible by their work, but in
whose wealth they have too small a share. In such conditions an
internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed
people is not to be expected. On the contrary, they are not
prepared to acknowledge the prohibitions, they are intent on
destroying the culture itself, and possibly even on doing away with
the postulates on which it is based. The hostility of these classes
to civilization is so obvious that it has caused the more latent
hostility of the social strata that are better provided for to be
overlooked. It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves
so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them
into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting
existence.

   The extent to which a
civilization’s precepts have been internalized - to express
it popularly and unpsychologically: the moral level of its
participants - is not the only form of mental wealth that comes
into consideration in estimating a civilization’s value.
There are in addition its assets in the shape of ideals and
artistic creations - that is, the satisfactions that can be derived
from those sources.

The Future Of An Illusion

4425

   People will be only too readily
inclined to include among the psychical assets of a culture its
ideals - its estimates of what achievements are the highest and the
most to be striven after. It will seem at first as though these
ideals would determine the achievements of the cultural unit; but
the actual course of events would appear to be that the ideals are
based on the first achievements which have been made possible by a
combination of the culture’s internal gifts and external
circumstances, and that these first achievements are then held on
to by the ideal as something to be carried further. The
satisfaction which the ideal offers to the participants in the
culture is thus of a narcissistic nature; it rests on their pride
in what has already been successfully achieved. To make this
satisfaction complete calls for a comparison with other cultures
which have aimed at different achievements and have developed
different ideals. On the strength of these differences every
culture claims the right to look down on the rest. In this way
cultural ideals become a source of discord and enmity between
different cultural units, as can be seen most clearly in the case
of nations.

   The narcissistic satisfaction
provided by the cultural ideal is also among the forces which are
successful in combating the hostility to culture within the
cultural unit. This satisfaction can be shared in not only by the
favoured classes, which enjoy the benefits of the culture, but also
by the suppressed ones, since the right to despise the people
outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within their
own unit. No doubt one is a wretched plebeian, harassed by debts
and military service; but, to make up for it, one is a Roman
citizen, one has one’s share in the task of ruling other
nations and dictating their laws. This identification of the
suppressed classes with the class who rules and exploits them is,
however, only part of a larger whole. For, on the other hand, the
suppressed classes can be emotionally attached to their masters; in
spite of their hostility to them they may see in them their ideals;
unless such relations of a fundamentally satisfying kind subsisted,
it would be impossible to understand how a number of civilizations
have survived so long in spite of the justifiable hostility of
large human masses.

The Future Of An Illusion

4426

   A different kind of satisfaction
is afforded by art to the participants in a cultural unit, though
as a rule it remains inaccessible to the masses, who are engaged in
exhausting work and have not enjoyed any personal education. As we
discovered long since, art offers substitutive satisfactions for
the oldest and still most deeply felt cultural renunciations, and
for that reason it serves as nothing else does to reconcile a man
to the sacrifices he has made on behalf of civilization. On the
other hand, the creations of art heighten his feelings of
identification, of which every cultural unit stands in so much
need, by providing an occasion for sharing highly valued emotional
experiences. And when those creations picture the achievements of
his particular culture and bring to his mind its ideals in an
impressive manner, they also minister to his narcissistic
satisfaction.

   No mention has yet been made of
what is perhaps the most important item in the psychical inventory
of a civilization. This consists in its religious ideas in the
widest sense - in other words (which will be justified later) in
its illusions.

The Future Of An Illusion

4427

III

In what does the peculiar value of religious
ideas lie?

   We have spoken of the hostility
to civilization which is produced by the pressure that civilization
exercises, the renunciations of instinct which it demands. If one
imagines its prohibitions lifted - if, then, one may take any woman
one pleases as a sexual object, if one may without hesitation kill
one’s rival for her love or anyone else who stands in
one’s way, if, too, one can carry off any of the other
man’s belongings without asking leave - how splendid, what a
string of satisfactions one’s life would be! True, one soon
comes across the first difficulty: everyone else has exactly the
same wishes as I have and will treat me with no more consideration
than I treat him. And so in reality only one person could be made
unrestrictedly happy by such a removal of the restrictions of
civilization, and he would be a tyrant, a dictator, who had seized
all the means to power. And even he would have every reason to wish
that the others would observe at least one cultural commandment:
‘thou shalt not kill’.

   But how ungrateful, how
short-sighted after all, to strive for the abolition of
civilization! What would then remain would be a state of nature,
and that would be far harder to bear. It is true that nature would
not demand any restrictions of instinct from us, she would let us
do as we liked; but she has her own particularly effective method
of restricting us. She destroys us coldly, cruelly, relentlessly,
as it seems to us, and possibly through the very things that
occasioned our satisfaction. It was precisely because of these
dangers with which nature threatens us that we came together and
created civilization, which is also, among other things, intended
to make our communal life possible. For the principal task of
civilization, its actual
raison d’être
, is to
defend us against nature.

   We all know that in many ways
civilization does this fairly well already, and clearly as time
goes on it will do it much better. But no one is under the illusion
that nature has already been vanquished; and few dare hope that she
will ever be entirely subjected to man. There are the elements,
which seem to mock at all human control: the earth, which quakes
and is torn apart and buries all human life and its works; water,
which deluges and drowns everything in a turmoil; storms, which
blow everything before them; there are diseases, which we have only
recently recognized as attacks by other organisms; and finally
there is the painful riddle of death, against which no medicine has
yet been found, nor probably will be. With these forces nature
rises up against us, majestic, cruel and inexorable; she brings to
our mind once more our weakness and helplessness, which we thought
to escape through the work of civilization. One of the few
gratifying and exalting impressions which mankind can offer is
when, in the face of an elemental catastrophe, it forgets the
discordancies of its civilization and all its internal difficulties
and animosities, and recalls the great common task of preserving
itself against the superior power of nature.

The Future Of An Illusion

4428

   For the individual, too, life is
hard to bear, just as it is for mankind in general. The
civilization in which he participates imposes some amount of
privation on him, and other men bring him a measure of suffering,
either in spite of the precepts of his civilization or because of
its imperfections. To this are added the injuries which untamed
nature - he calls it Fate - inflicts on him. One might suppose that
this condition of things would result in a permanent state of
anxious expectation in him and a severe injury to his natural
narcissism. We know already how the individual reacts to the
injuries which civilization and other men inflict on him: he
develops a corresponding degree of resistance to the regulations of
civilization and of hostility to it. But how does he defend himself
against the superior powers of nature, of Fate, which threaten him
as they threaten all the rest?

   Civilization relieves him of this
task; it performs it in the same way for all alike; and it is
noteworthy that in this almost all civilizations act alike.
Civilization does not call a halt in the task of defending man
against nature, it merely pursues it by other means. The task is a
manifold one. Man’s self-regard, seriously menaced, calls for
consolation; life and the universe must be robbed of their terrors;
moreover his curiosity, moved, it is true, by the strongest
practical interest, demands an answer.

   A great deal is already gained
with the first step: the humanization of nature. Impersonal forces
and destinies cannot be approached; they remain eternally remote.
But if the elements have passions that rage as they do in our own
souls, if death itself is not something spontaneous but the violent
act of an evil Will, if everywhere in nature there are Beings
around us of a kind that we know in our own society, then we can
breathe freely, can feel at home in the uncanny and can deal by
psychical means with our senseless anxiety. We are still
defenceless, perhaps, but we are no longer helplessly paralysed; we
can at least react. Perhaps, indeed, we are not even defenceless.
We can apply the same methods against these violent supermen
outside that we employ in our own society; we can try to adjure
them, to appease them, to bribe them, and, by so influencing them,
we may rob them of a part of their power. A replacement like this
of natural science by psychology not only provides immediate
relief, but also points the way to a further mastering of the
situation.