The New Society | Page 3

it was sincere enough, only it did not go deep.
It was the kind of sincerity which depends on not knowing enough of
the alternative possibilities.
When the alternatives revealed themselves as possible and actual, then
we all turned republican, even to the cottagers in Pomerania. When the
military strike had broken down discipline, the officers were
mishandled; when the war was lost, the fleet disgraced, and the
homeland defiled, then we began to play and dance.
But was this frivolity? Not at all; it was a childish want of political
imagination. The Poles, a people not remotely comparable to the
German in depth of soul and the capacity for training talent, have for a
century cherished no other thought than that of national unity, while we
passively resign our territories. No Englishman or Japanese or
American will ever understand us when we tell him that this military
discipline of ours, this war-lust, did not represent a passion for
dominion and aggression, but was merely the docility of a childish
people which wants nothing, and can imagine nothing, but that things
should go on as they happen, at the moment, to be.
We Germans know but little of the laws which govern the formation of
national character. The capacity of a people for profundity is not
profundity, either of the individual or of the community. It may express
itself in the masses as mere plasticity and softness of spirit. The
capacity for collective sagacity and strength of will demands from the
individual merely a dry intelligence in human affairs, and egoism. It
would be too much to say that our political weakness may be merely
the expression of spiritual power, for the latter has not proved an
obstacle to success in business. Indolence and belief in authority have
their share in it.

But have we not been the classic land of social democracy, and have
we not become that of Radicalism? Well, we have been, indeed, and are,
with our submissiveness to authority and our capacity for discipline,
the classic land of organized grumbling; and the classic land, too, of
anti-semitism which deprived us of the very forces we stood most in
need of--productive scepticism and the imagination for concrete things.
Organized grumbling is not the same thing as political creation. A
Socialism and Radicalism poorer in ideas than the post-Marxian
German Socialism has never existed. Half of it was merely clerical
work, and the other half was agitators' Utopianism of the cheapest
variety.
Nothing was more significant than the fact that the mighty event of the
German Revolution was not the result of affection but of disaffection. It
is not we who liberated ourselves, it was the enemy; it was our
destruction that set us free. On the day before we asked for the
armistice, perhaps even on the day before the flight of the Kaiser, a
plébiscite would have yielded an overwhelming majority for the
monarchy and against Socialism. What I so often said before the war
came true: "He who trains his children with the rod learns only through
the rod."
And to-day, when everything is seething and fermenting--no thanks to
Socialism for that--all intellectual work has to be done outside of the
ranks of social-democracy, which stumbles along on its two crutches of
"Socialization" and "Soviets."[2] Orthodox Socialism is still a case of
the "lesser evil," what the French call a pis aller. "Things are so bad
that any change must be for the better." What is to make them better we
are told in the socialist catechism; but how it is to do so, how and what
anything is to become, this, the only question that matters, is regarded
as irrelevant. It is answered by some halting and insincere stammer
about "surplus value" which is to make everybody well off--and which
would yield all round, as I have elsewhere shown, just twenty-five
marks a head. Fifteen millions of grown men are pressing forward into
a Promised Land revealed through the fog of political assemblies and in
the thunder of parrot-phrases--a land from which no one will ever bring
back a bunch of grapes.

If one would interrogate not the agitators, but their hearers, and find out
what they instinctively conceive this land to look like, we should get
the answer, timid and naïve but at the same time the deepest and
shrewdest that it is possible to give--that it is a land where there are no
longer any rich.
A most true and truthful reply! And yet a profound error silently lurks
in it. You imagine, do you not, that in a land where there are no more
rich people there will also be no more poor? "Why, of course not! How
can there be poor people when there are no more rich?" And yet there
will