About Idolaters And False Absolutes
In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates it, projects his flames and his insanity on it; impure, transformed into belief, it is inserted in time, takes the form of an event: the passage from logic to epilepsy is consumed… Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farces.
Idolaters by instinct, we convert into unconditioned the objects of our dreams and our interests. History is only a parade of false Absolutes, a succession of temples raised to pretexts, a debasement of the spirit before the improbable. Even when he moves away from religion, man remains subjected to it; exhausting himself to forge simulacra of gods, he then adopts them feverishly: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over the obvious and the ridiculous. His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: he who loves a god indefinitely, forces others to love him, while waiting to exterminate them if they refuse. No intolerance, ideological intransigence or proselytism that does not reveal the bestial bottom of the enthusiasm. Let man lose his faculty of indifference: he becomes a virtual assassin; let him transform his idea into a god: the consequences are incalculable. One only kills in the name of a god or its counterfeits: the excesses aroused by the goddess Reason, by the idea of nation, class or race are related to those of the Inquisition or the Reformation. The times of fervor excel in bloody exploits: Saint Theresa could not but be contemporary of the autodafés, and Luther of the massacre of the peasants. In the mystical crises, the moans of the victims are parallel to the moans of the ecstasy… Jails, dungeons, prisons only thrive in the shadow of a faith, — of this need to believe which has infested the spirit for ever. The devil looks very pale next to the one who has a truth, his truth. We are unjust to the Nerons, to the Tiberians: they did not invent the concept of heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers entertaining themselves with massacres. The real criminals are those who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.
When one refuses to admit the interchangeability of ideas, blood flows… Under firm resolutions a dagger is raised; the inflamed eyes foreshadow murder. No hesitant spirit, affected by hamletarianism, was ever pernicious: the principle of evil resides in the tension of the will, in the ineptitude to quietism, in the Promethean megalomania of a race which is dying of ideals, which bursts under its convictions and which, for having been complicit in flouting doubt and laziness, — vices more noble than all its virtues — has committed itself to a path of perdition, in history, in this indecent mixture of banality and apocalypse. .. Certainties abound: remove them, remove especially their consequences: you reconstitute paradise. What is the Fall if not the pursuit of a truth and the assurance of having found it, the passion for a dogma, the establishment in a dogma? Fanaticism results from it, — a capital flaw which gives man the taste of efficiency, of prophecy, of terror, — a lyrical leprosy by which it contaminates souls, subdues them, crushes them or exalts them… Only the skeptics (or the lazy and the aesthetes) escape it, because they do not propose anything, because — true benefactors of humanity — they destroy its biases and analyze its delirium. I feel safer with a Pyrrhon than with a Saint Paul, for the reason that a wisdom in jest is sweeter than a raging sanctity. In a fiery spirit one finds the beast of prey in disguise; one cannot defend oneself too much from the claws of a prophet… If he raises his voice, be it in the name of heaven, of the city or of other pretexts, keep away from him: satyr of your solitude, he does not forgive you for living below his truths and his outbursts; his hysteria, his good, he wants to make you travel, to impose it on you and disfigure you. A being possessed by a belief and who would not seek to communicate it to others, — is a phenomenon foreign to the earth, where the obsession with salvation makes life unbreathable. Look around you: everywhere larvae preach; every institution translates a mission; the town halls have their absolutes like the temples; the administration, with its regulations, — metaphysics for the use of monkeys… All strive to remedy the life of all: the beggars, the incurable even aspire to it: the sidewalks of the world and the hospitals overflow with reformers. The desire to become a source of events acts on each one like a mental disorder or like a willed curse. Society, -a hell of saviors! What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent…
It is enough for me to hear someone speak sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say "we" with an inflection of assurance, to invoke the "others", and to consider himself their interpreter, - for me to consider him my enemy. I see in him a failed tyrant, an approximate executioner, as hateful as the tyrants, as the executioners of great class. It is that any faith exerts a form of terror, all the more frightening because the "pure" are its agents. One is suspicious of the finnicky, the rascals, the jokers; however, one cannot impute to them any of the great convulsions of history; not believing in anything, they do not search your hearts, nor your ulterior motives; they abandon you to your non chalance, to your despair or to your uselessness; humanity owes to them the few moments of prosperity that it has known: they are the ones who save the people that the fanatics torture and that the "idealists" ruin. Without doctrine, they have only whims and interests, accommodating vices, a thousand times more bearable than the ravages caused by the despotism with principles; because all the evils of the life come from a "conception of the life". An accomplished politician should study the ancient sophists and take lessons in singing and corruption... The fanatic, on the other hand, is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well be killed for it; in both cases, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster. There are no beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited among the martyrs whose heads have not been cut off. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it; also the spirit feels more at ease in the society of a boaster than in that of a martyr; and nothing is so repugnant to it as this spectacle where one dies for an idea... Exhausted by the sublime and the carnage, he dreams of a provincial boredom on the scale of the universe, of a History whose stagnation would be such that the doubt would be drawn there like an event and the hope like a calamity...
