Freud - Complete Works (731 page)

   So far, we can quite well imagine
a cultural community consisting of double individuals like this,
who, libidinally satisfied in themselves, are connected with one
another through the bonds of common work and common interests. If
this were so, civilization would not have to withdraw any energy
from sexuality. But this desirable state of things does not, and
never did, exist. Reality shows us that civilization is not content
with the ties we have so far allowed it. It aims at binding the
members of the community together in a libidinal way as well and
employs every means to that end. It favours every path by which
strong identifications can be established between the members of
the community, and it summons up aim-inhibited libido on the
largest scale so as to strengthen the communal bond by relations of
friendship. In order for these aims to be fulfilled, a restriction
upon sexual life is unavoidable. But we are unable to understand
what the necessity is which forces civilization along this path and
which causes its antagonism to sexuality. There must be some
disturbing factor which we have not yet discovered.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4501

   The clue may be supplied by one
of the ideal demands, as we have called them, of civilized society.
It runs: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ It
is known throughout the world and is undoubtedly older than
Christianity, which puts it forward as its proudest claim. Yet it
is certainly not very old; even in historical times it was still
strange to mankind. Let us adopt a naïve attitude towards it,
as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable
then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment. Why should
we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we
achieve it? How can it be possible? My love is something valuable
to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. It
imposes duties on me for whose fulfilment I must be ready to make
sacrifices. If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way. (I
leave out of account the use he may be to me, and also his possible
significance for me as a sexual object, for neither of these two
kinds of relationship comes into question where the precept to love
my neighbour is concerned.) He deserves it if he is so like me in
important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if
he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of
my own self in him. Again, I have to love him if he is my
friend’s son, since the pain my friend would feel if any harm
came to him would be my pain too - I should have to share it. But
if he is a stranger to me and if he cannot attract me by any worth
of his own or any significance that he may already have acquired
for my emotional life, it will be hard for me to love him. Indeed,
I should be wrong to do so, for my love is valued by all my own
people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to
them if I put a stranger on a par with them. But if I am to love
him (with this universal love) merely because he, too, is an
inhabitant of this earth, like an insect, an earth-worm or a
grass-snake, then I fear that only a small modicum of my love will
fall to his share - not by any possibility as much as, by the
judgement of my reason, I am entitled to retain for myself. What is
the point of a precept enunciated with so much solemnity if its
fulfilment cannot be recommended as reasonable?

Civilization And Its Discontents

4502

   On closer inspection, I find
still further difficulties. Not merely is this stranger in general
unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more claim
to my hostility and even my hatred. He seems not to have the least
trace of love for me and shows me not the slightest consideration.
If it will do him any good he has no hesitation in injuring me, nor
does he ask himself whether the amount of advantage he gains bears
any proportion to the extent of the harm he does to me. Indeed, he
need not even obtain an advantage; if he can satisfy any sort of
desire by it, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me,
slandering me and showing his superior power; and the more secure
he feels and the more helpless I am, the more certainly I can
expect him to behave like this to me. If he behaves differently, if
he shows me consideration and forbearance as a stranger, I am ready
to treat him in the same way, in any case and quite apart from any
precept. Indeed, if this grandiose commandment had run ‘Love
thy neighbour as thy neighbour loves thee’, I should not take
exception to it. And there is a second commandment, which seems to
me even more incomprehensible and arouses still stronger opposition
in me. It is ‘Love thine enemies’. If I think it over,
however, I see that I am wrong in treating it as a greater
imposition. At bottom it is the same thing.¹

  
¹
A great imaginative writer may permit
himself to give expression - jokingly, at all events - to
psychological truths that are severely proscribed. Thus Heine
confesses: ‘Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes
are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good
food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a
few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my
happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or
seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I
shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in
their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies -
but not before they have been hanged.’ (
Gedanken und
Einfälle
.)

Civilization And Its Discontents

4503

   I think I can now hear a
dignified voice admonishing me: ‘It is precisely because your
neighbour is not worthy of love, and is on the contrary your enemy,
that you should love him as yourself.’ I then understand that
the case is one like that of
Credo quia absurdum
.

   Now it is very probable that my
neighbour, when he is enjoined to love me as himself, will answer
exactly as I have done and will repel me for the same reasons. I
hope he will not have the same objective grounds for doing so, but
he will have the same idea as I have. Even so, the behaviour of
human beings shows differences, which ethics, disregarding the fact
that such differences are determined, classifies as
‘good’ or ‘bad’. So long as these
undeniable differences have not been removed, obedience to high
ethical demands entails damage to the aims of civilization, for it
puts a positive premium on being bad. One is irresistibly reminded
of an incident in the French Chamber when capital punishment was
being debated. A member had been passionately supporting its
abolition and his speech was being received with tumultuous
applause, when a voice from the hall called out: ‘Que
messieurs les assassins commencent!’

   The element of truth behind all
this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not
gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can
defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary,
creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a
powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is
for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also
someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to
exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him
sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to
humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.
Homo homini lupus
. Who, in the face of all his experience of
life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this
assertion? As a rule this cruel aggressiveness waits for some
provocation or puts itself at the service of some other purpose,
whose goal might also have been reached by milder measures. In
circumstances that are favourable to it, when the mental
counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it
also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage
beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something
alien. Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities committed during the
racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people
known as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane, or at the
capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or even, indeed, the
horrors of the recent World War - anyone who calls these things to
mind will have to bow humbly before the truth of this view.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4504

   The existence of this inclination
to aggression, which we can detect in ourselves and justly assume
to be present in others, is the factor which disturbs our relations
with our neighbour and which forces civilization into such a high
expenditure. In consequence of this primary mutual hostility of
human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with
disintegration. The interest of work in common would not hold it
together; instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable
interests. Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to
set limits to man’s aggressive instincts and to hold the
manifestations of them in check by psychical reaction-formations.
Hence, therefore, the use of methods intended to incite people into
identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of love, hence the
restriction upon sexual life, and hence too the ideal’s
commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself - a
commandment which is really justified by the fact that nothing else
runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man. In spite of
every effort, these endeavours of civilization have not so far
achieved very much. It hopes to prevent the crudest excesses of
brutal violence by itself assuming the right to use violence
against criminals, but the law is not able to lay hold of the more
cautious and refined manifestations of human aggressiveness The
time comes when each one of us has to give up as illusions the
expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow men,
and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added
to his life by their ill-will. At the same time, it would be unfair
to reproach civilization with trying to eliminate strife and
competition from human activity. These things are undoubtedly
indispensable. But opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is
merely misused and made an
occasion
for enmity.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4505

   The communists believe that they
have found the path to deliverance from our evils. According to
them, man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbour; but
the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. The
ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and with it
the temptation to ill-treat his neighbour; while the man who is
excluded from possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his
oppressor. If private property were abolished, all wealth held in
common, and everyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it,
ill-will and hostility would disappear among men. Since
everyone’s needs would be satisfied, no one would have any
reason to regard another as his enemy; all would willingly
undertake the work that was necessary. I have no concern with any
economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into
whether the abolition of private property is expedient or
advantageous.¹ But I am able to recognize that the
psychological premisses on which the system is based are an
untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the
human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a
strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no
way altered the differences in power and influence which are
misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its
nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned
almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still
very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost
before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the
basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with
the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to
her male child). If we do away with personal rights over material
wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual
relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest
dislike and the most violent hostility among men who in other
respects are on an equal footing. If we were to remove this factor,
too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus
abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it
is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of
civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is
that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow it
there.

  
¹
Anyone who has tasted the miseries of
poverty in his own youth and has experienced the indifference and
arrogance of the well-to-do, should be safe from the suspicion of
having no understanding or good will towards endeavours to fight
against the inequality of wealth among men and all that it leads
to. To be sure, if an attempt is made to base this fight upon an
abstract demand, in the name of justice, for equality for all men,
there is a very obvious objection to be made - that nature, by
endowing individuals with extremely unequal physical attributes and
mental capacities, has introduced injustices against which there is
no remedy.

Civilization And Its Discontents

4506

   It is clearly not easy for men to
give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do
not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a
comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct
an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be
despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable
number of people in love, so long as there are other people left
over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. I once
discussed the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with
adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as
well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each
other - like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North
Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I
gave this phenomenon the name of ‘the narcissism of minor
differences’, a name which does not do much to explain it. We
can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless
satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which
cohesion between the members of the community is made easier. In
this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered
most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that
have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the
Jews in the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more
peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows. When once the
Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the
foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the
part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became
the inevitable consequence. To the Romans, who had not founded
their communal life as a State upon love, religious intolerance was
something foreign, although with them religion was a concern of the
State and the State was permeated by religion. Neither was it an
unaccountable chance that the dream of a Germanic world-dominion
called for anti-Semitism as its complement; and it is intelligible
that the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in
Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of
the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets
will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois.