The Aristos

1 I trace all these anxieties back to a supreme source of anguish: that of the nemo.

2 Freud, like arbitrary but convenient Caesar with Gaul, divided the human psyche into three parts, or activities: the super-ego, which attempts to control or repress the other two parts; the ego, which is the province of conscious desires; and the id, which is the obscure chaos of unconscious forces. To Freud the basic energy that both requires the interaction and explains the functions of these three parts of the psyche was the libido, sexual desire, which wells or explodes out of the unconscious, is utilized by the ego and more or less regulated by the super-ego. Most psychologists now recognize that while sexual desire is an important constituent of the raw energy that orientates and fuels our behaviour, it is not the only one. Another very primitive drive is the need for security.

3 But I believe each human psyche has a fourth element, which, using a word indicated by the Freudian terminology, I call the nemo. By this I mean not only ‘nobody’ but also the state of being nobody – ‘nobodiness’. In short, just as physicists now postulate an anti-matter, so must we consider the possibility that there exists in the human psyche an anti-ego. This is the nemo.

4 If this concept has not received much attention from psychologists it may be because it has not, like the other two truly primitive drives of sexual and security (or survival) desire, been with man so long. The desires for sexual satisfaction and security are not even specifically human ones; they are shared by almost all animate matter. But the nemo is a specifically human psychic force; a function of civilization, of communication, of the uniquely human ability to compare and hypothesize. Moreover, it is a negative force. We are not, as in the cases of sexual desire and security, attracted towards it; but repelled from it. The superego, ego and id at least seem broadly favourable to the self, and help preserve both individuality and the species. But the nemo is an enemy in the camp.

5 It is not only that we can imagine opposite states, such as the non-existence of the existent thing; we can imagine countless intermediary states. And our nemo gains power over our behaviour to the extent that we believe that were it not for the faults of the human condition, or of society, or of our education, or of our economic position, then we might be what we can imagine. It grows, in short, in strict relation to our sense and knowledge of general and personal inequality.

6 There are basic aspects of the nemo that can never be remedied. I can never be the historical Shakespeare or the historical Cleopatra; I can never be some modern equivalent of them. I can never live for ever… and so on. I can imagine myself to be countless things that I shall never be; for I can never be without the physical and psychological defects it is beyond my own, and science’s, powers to remedy. Though it is logically nonsensical to call the inevitable a state of inequality, we do in fact think of it so. And this may be termed the permanent metaphysical sense of the nemo in all of us.

7 The nemo is a man’s sense of his own futility and ephemerality; of his relativity, his comparativeness; of his virtual nothingness.

8 All of us are failures; we all die.

9 Nobody wants to be a nobody. All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mask the emptiness we feel at the core.

10 We all like to be loved or hated; it is a sign that we shall be remembered, that we did not ‘not exist’. For this reason, many unable to create love have created hate. That too is remembered.

11 The individual thing in front of the whole: my insignificance in face of all that has existed, exists, and will exist. We are almost all dwarfs, and we have the complexes and psychological traits characteristic of dwarfs: feelings of inferiority, with compensatory cunning and malice.

12 We have different ideas of what constitutes a ‘somebody’; but there are certain generally accepted specifications. It is necessary to make my name known; I must have power – physical, social, intellectual, artistic, political… but power. I must leave monuments, I must be remembered. I must be admired, envied, hated, feared, desired. In short, I must endure, I must extend, and beyond the body and the body’s life.

13 Belief in an afterlife is partly an ostrich attempt to cheat the nemo.

14 The new paradise is the entry after death into that world of the remembered dead where the Irving continue to wander. One gained access to the old paradise by good actions and divine grace; but one gains access to the new paradise simply by actions: actions good or bad that will be remembered. In the new paradise the elect are the notorious, the most famous, the greatest of their kind – whatever that kind was.

15 There are two principal ways to defeat the nemo: I can conform or I can conflict. If I conform to the society I live in, I will use the agreed symbols of success, the status symbols, to prove that I am somebody. Some uniforms prove I am a success; others hide that I am a failure. One of the attractions of the uniform is that it puts a man in a situation where part of the blame for failure can always be put on the group. A uniform equalizes all who wear it. They all fail together; if there is success, they all share it.

16 I can counter my nemo by conflicting; by adopting my own special style of life. I build up an elaborate unique persona, I defy the mass. I am the bohemian, the dandy, the outsider, the hippy.

17 A great deal of recent art has been conditioned by the pressures of the nemo. There is the desperate search for the unique style, and only too often this search is conducted at the expense of content. Genius will satisfy both requirements; but many a less gifted contemporary artist has become the victim of his own ‘trademark’. This accounts for the enormous proliferation in styles and techniques in our century; and for that only too characteristic coupling of exoticism of presentation with banality of theme. Once artists ran to a centre; now they fly to the circumference. And the result is our new rococo.

18 One may call this the positive evil effect on art of the nemo; but it has also a negative evil one. A jungle of pastiche grows round each work or artist that is felt to be genuinely ‘creative’ – that is, nemo-killing.

19 Romantic and post-Romantic art is all pervaded by fear of the nemo; by the flight of the individual from whatever threatens his individuality. The calm of classical statues, classical architecture, classical poetry seems noble perhaps, but infinitely remote; and when it is without genius, classical art seems to us now insipidly bland and monotonously impersonal.

20 At the same time never have so many had such easy access to great art. The best is everywhere. The smaller we feel, the less able we are to be creative. This is why we try to escape through futile new styles, futile new fashions, like panic-stricken children in a building on fire; throwing ourselves at every exit.

21 We live in an age of short-duration goods. Most of us are concerned in the production of such goods. Few of us now produce things that will outlast the next five years, let alone our lives. We are part of a chain. We are nemo-tyrannized.

22 As populations increase, the people that seem to have conquered the nemo gain in fascination; and quite irrespective of their human worth.

23 Oswald killed President Kennedy in order to kill his real enemy: his nemo. He was not a man blind to reality, but hypersensitive to it. What drove him to kill was the poisonous injustice of both his particular society and the whole process. Again and again the anarchist assassins of the late nineteenth century asserted this: they did what they did to make themselves equal with the assassinated. One said: ‘Now I shall be remembered as long as he is.’*

24 The German people allowed Hitler to dominate their lives for the same reason. Like individuals, races and countries can lose their sense of importance, of meaningfulness. A great dictator is like a uniform; he gives the illusion to all below him that the nemo is defeated.

25 On a less harmful level we see it in the mass admiration of the famous and the successful; of the film star, the ‘personality’, the ‘celebrity’; in the popularity of the gossip magazine, the pin-up cult, the cheap biography, in the imitative mannerisms and living-styles disseminated by women’s magazines. We see it in the attention lavished on every flashy mediocrity, every mayfly success. It is not only Hollywood that treats everything it produces as ‘great’: the public wants this spurious greatness.

26 The nemo is strongest in the most evolved and best educated, weakest in the most primitive and ignorant. So it is clear that its power can only increase, not only as higher general standards of education are achieved, but also as the populations of the world grow. To the extent that there is more opportunity for leisure and more information available, boredom and envy will also increase. Terrible chain-reactions come into play: the more individuals the less individual they each feel; the more clearly they see injustice and inequality the more helpless they seem to become; the more they know the more they want to be known; and the more they want to be known the less likely it becomes that they will be.

27 As it becomes increasingly difficult to defeat the nemo by attracting attention in the outside world, we turn increasingly to the small personal world in which we live: to friends, relations, neighbours, colleagues. If we can defeat the nemo there, then that at least is something; and so arises the current obsession with conspicuous consumption, with keeping up with the Joneses, with proving our superiority on however absurd and humble a level – in our skill with a golf-club, with Italian cooking, with growing roses. So arises our mania for gambling in all its forms; and even our preoccupation with things excellent in themselves, like higher wages and healthier and better-educated children.

28 But the most common refuge against the nemo is the marriage, the family, the home. Children, the long-walk of the blood, are the real life-insurance. Yet the nemo may cause abuse in this situation. It may force the individual to act the part at home that he or she cannot act in public and can act only otherwise in the world of dreams. The would-be dictator becomes the domestic dictator; the remembered in this room. It may force parents to be tyrants; the husband or wife into infidelity. There is no commoner flight from the nemo than into a forbidden bed.

29 The ordinary man and woman live in an asphyxiating smog of opinions foisted on them by society. They lose all independence of judgement and all freedom of action. They see themselves increasingly as limited special functions, as parts of a machine, with neither need nor right to perform any other than their role in the economic structure of society. The civic sense becomes atrophied. It is the job of the police to prevent crimes, not yours or mine; it is the job of the town councillor to run the town, not yours or mine; it is the job of the underprivileged to fight for their rights, not yours or mine. Thus more and more live in cities, and yet more and more become decitizenized. What began in the suburbs reaches right to the city’s heart.

THE POLITICAL NEMO

30 The atrophy of the civic sense is one of the most striking social phenomena of our age. Man is a political being; and this atrophy is caused by the fact that however successful we may be in other fields in dealing with the nemo, we are all almost no more than helpless cogs in the political machine.

31 We have no political power at all. This is not a new state of affairs, but there is a new quasi-existentialist awareness that the state exists.

32 In the world as it is, democracy, the right of any sane adult to vote freely for the freely-elected candidate of a freely-constituted party with a freely-evolved policy, is the best system. It is the best system not because it will necessarily produce the best regime, but because it gives most freedom of choice to beings whose most urgent need is freedom of choice. No electorate, if allowed to choose, will choose the same general policy unanimously. This key political reality, based on the fact that there is no economic equality anywhere in the world, means that any regime maintaining that the right choice of general policy is so obvious that the electorate need not and should not be given the opportunity to vote for any other policy is a danger nationally and internationally; and this is so even when the regime is demonstrably right in its choice of policy. It is a national danger mainly because it is also an international one.

33 The Platonic republic could impose humanity and nobility on its citizens, but this very imposition of what might have been freely expressed on what might have freely expressed it immediately sets up a tension that vitiates the theoretical goodness of the measures imposed. I can stick artificial flowers on this tree that will not flower; or I can create the conditions in which the tree is likely to flower naturally. I may have to wait longer for my real flowers, but they are the only true ones.

34 Democracy tries to give choice to as many as possible, and this is its saving virtue; but the wider the franchise and the larger the population grows, the sharper becomes the irony.

35 A few dozen act while millions stand impotent.

36 That everyone has the vote is a general guarantee of some sort of freedom; but it means nothing in itself. My vote influences nothing, decides nothing. Whether I vote or not is immaterial.

37 I vote because not to vote represents a denial of the principle of right of franchise; but not because voting in any way relieves my sense that I am a pawn, and a smaller and smaller pawn, as the electorate grows.

38 An informed man of fifty is the equal at the polling booth of a shopgirl who left school when she was fifteen and knows no more of the real issues on which she is voting than a parrot. They must, to satisfy democracy, be equal at the polling booth; the informed man of fifty would probably be the first to say so. Yet there is a cruelty in this situation, an irony, and an absurdity. An intelligent man is not the same as an ignoramus; yet this is what the polling booth says.

39 A common result of this necessary yet merciless equality; I have no real say in the way the society and country I live in are run; I will do for them what they force me by law to do; but all the rest of my energy and resources will be for my private ends. This sense of total non-participation, of being a pawn in the hands of the chess players, the governors and ministers, is seemingly paralleled in the cosmic situation; and our view of that situation is coloured, darkly, by our view of our virtually non-existent part in the government of our own country.

40 My vote is a futile scrap of paper tossed in a great river; and my life seems a futile atom lost in the endless flux. Resentment becomes pragmatic; egocentric-ity, logical; and the expression of political feeling by illegal and dangerous means – anarchy, rioting; subversion – inevitable.

41 There is only one practical way of lessening this pawn complex and that is by adding to the usual definition of democracy (the right of all adults to vote freely) the rider ‘and as frequently as is conveniently possible’. We can now certainly cope with the technological and social problems of a more frequent general vote on great national issues; and in most Western countries we can, or could, provide the indispensable safeguards of a free press and an unbiassed service of information together with a sufficiently high general standard of education to comprehend and assess it.

42 The one group of people who would certainly reject this idea are the politicians themselves, although they increasingly pay attention to what is a form of unofficial (and dangerously manipulatable) plebiscite: the opinion poll. Their arguments are familiar – the fickleness and emotional nature of public opinion, the impossibility of governing without continuity of policy, the need to keep secret certain factors in decision-making, and so on. These arguments are not without reason. But men in power are never wholly disinterested in retaining power. However much they may disagree with their opponents over policy, they will agree on the rules of the power game; who gets control may fight tooth and nail to keep it.

43 The public is woman before emancipation. If she was fickle and emotional in her decisions it was because she had never been allowed or expected or conditioned to be anything else; and just as this was a dangerous situation for society, so is the present total non-participation in government by the vast majority of adults.

44 A more frequent vote system would not greatly alleviate the individual predicament, which is strictly a numerical one. The single vote must always count for nothing. But it is the first step towards a less isolating situation. Meanwhile, we shall remain the impotent millions.

THE NECESSITY OF THE NEMO

45 And yet the nemo, like hazard, like the indifference of the process to the individual, is essential to man. It is the effect in him of knowing that human existence is unequal. It is both the passive horror of this condition and the active source of the energy needed to remedy it.

46 The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it.