...Democracy is the word in which you must lead them by the nose. The good work in which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won't. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether "democratic behavior" means the behavior that democracies like or the behavior that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course is connected with the political idea that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political idea to a factual belief that all mean ARE equal. As a result you then can use the name democracy to sanction in all thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of all human feelings. You can get him to practice, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.
The feeling I mean of course is that which prompts a man to say I'm as good as you! The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the center of his life a good solid, resounding lie. I don't mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waste measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I'm as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, withering awareness of an inferiority which the mark refuses to except, and therefore resents.
Therefore they will resent every kind of superiority in others, denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he will suspect every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choices of food: Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly than I-it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-da affection. Here's a fellow who doesn't like hot dogs-thinks himself to good for them, no doubt. Here's a man who doesn't listen to music-he's one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to God all-right Joes they'd be like me! They have no business to be different. It's undemocratic!
Now, this useful phenomenon is in itself is by no means new. Under the name of envy it has been known to humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame, those who were not gave it no quarter in others. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it-make it respectable and even laudable-by the incantatory use of the word democratic.
Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labor more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to full humanity, actually draw back from it for fear of being undemocratic. I am creditably informed that young humans now sometimes suppress an incipient taste for classical music or good literature because it might prevent their Being Like Folks; that people who would really wish to be-and are offered the Grace which would enable them to be-honest, chaste, or temperate refuse it. To accept might make them different, might offend against the way of life, take them out of togetherness, impair their integration with the Group. They might HORROR of HORRORS become Individuals!
Meanwhile, as a delightful by-product, the few who will not be made Normal and Regular and Like Folks and Integrated increasingly tend to become in reality the prigs and cranks which they were believed to be. For suspicion often creates what it suspects. But this really is a mere by-product. What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence-moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how the word "democracy" is now doing for us the work that was once done by dictatorships. You remember how one of the Greek dictators sent an envoy to another dictator to ask his advise about the principles of government. This dictator lead the envoy into a field of grain, and there he cut off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer that the rest. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All EQUALS! Thus tyrants practiced in a sense democracy. But now "democracy" can do the same without any tyranny other than her own. No one need go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks. I have said that to secure the damnation of the human souls, these creatures that have almost ceased to be individual, is a laborious and tricky work. But if proper pains and skill are expended, you ca be fairly confident of the result.
In this promising time of the spirit of I am as Good as You it has already become more than just a generally social influence. It has become to work itself in their educational system. How far its operations there have gone a the present moment, I should not like to say with certainty. Nor does it matter. Once you have grasped the tendency, you can easily predict its future developments; as especially as we ourselves will play a part in the developing. The basic principle of the new education is to be that those who will not or cannot apply themselves must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. For that would be "undemocratic." these differences between the pupils-for there are obliviously and nakedly individual differences-must be disguised. This can be done on various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all its students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power or wish to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are to lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children use to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud pies and call it modeling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they might be inferior to the children who are hard at work. Whatever nonsense that they are engaged in, it must have-a parity of esteem. An even more drastic scheme is not impossible. Children who are fit to proceed to higher tasks may be artificially kept back, because the others would be traumatized by being left behind. The brightest pupils thus remain democratically fettered to his own age group throughout their school career and those who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT!
In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I am as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers-or should I say nurse?-will be far to busy reassuring the unmotivated and patting them on the back to waste time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among mankind. They shall do it for us! ...how delicious!
Of course, this would not follow unless all education became state education. But it will. That is part of the same movement. Taxes of all kinds, are designed for that purpose, they are liquidating the Middle Class, the class who were prepared to save and spend and make sacrifices in order to have their children properly taught. The removal of this class primarily by over taxation, besides the linking up with the abolition of education, is, fortunately, an inevitable effect of the spirit that says I am as Good as You. This was after all, the social group which gave to the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, and administrators. If there ever was a bunch of tall stalks that needed their tops knocked off, it was surely them. As prominent politician once said "A democracy does not want great men."
We, in hell, would welcome the disappearance of democracy in the strict sense of the word, the political arrangement so called. Like all forms of government, it often works to our advantage, but on the whole less often than other forms. And what we must realize is that "democracy" in the diabolical sense of the word (I am as good as you, Being like folks, Togetherness) is the finest instrument we could possibly have for extirpating political democracies from the face of the earth. For "democracy" in the diabolical sense (I am as good as you, Being like folks, Togetherness) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of sub literates, full of cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first hint of criticism. For when such a nation meets another where their children have been made to work at school, where talent is placed in high post and the unmotivated are allowed no say at all in public affairs, only one result is possible. What a delirious specimen of human blindness! If the whole tendency of their society is opposed to every sort of excellence, how does that society expect to excel?
It is our function to encourage this behavior, the manners, the whole attitude of the mind, which democracies naturally like and enjoy, because these are the very things if unchecked, will destroy all democracies! Encourage in your own minds that delusion which you must carefully foster in the minds of your human victims. I mean of course that the fate of nations is in itself more important than that of the individual soul. For the ultimate value for us, of any war, revolution, or famine lies in the individual anguish, treachery, hatred, rage, and despair which it may produce. I am as good as you is a useful means for the destruction of all democratic societies. But it has a far deeper value as an end in itself, as a state of mind which, necessarily excluding humility, charity, contentment, and all the pleasures of gratitude or admiration, turns human beings away from almost every road which finally leads them to peace or success.
