Let me say a word about the past that burdens me, the future that exhilarates me, and the present in which at every moment a reality I consider intolerable clashes with the living reality to which I aspire.
One need only review the roughly ten thousand years that make up our history to realize what a gulf separates technological from cultural progress. The path from the neolithic forge to the nuclear plant is immeasurably long; that from the sacking of the first city-states some six thousand years before our era and the Nazi camps, the Soviet gulag or the Rwandan genocide is horrifyingly short. From the bronze dagger to the ICBM, the military monster has barely altered.
What weight do technological advances and magnificent art carry alongside the poverty and fear whose permanence seems to reduce the long plaint of suffering humanity to a vain cry?
How can we forget that while Bach’s genius was enriching world culture millions of wretches were starving, dying under torture or being massacred by the armies of princes and the laws of the powerful?
I lived in a world where the yoke of tradition obliged you to bow down. Woe unto anyone who dared to stand up and mark themselves off from the enslaved masses! Force, lies and cunning were deployed to persuade them with carrot and stick to get back in line, to rejoin the herd that the power of State, church, and ideologies of every stripe were leading to the slaughterhouse.
Children were then taught that society was divided into two camps: those who eat and those who are eaten. From the tenderest age you were supposed to fight. For whom? For what? The noblest and the most ignominious of pretexts were wheeled out in order to lead us astray into battles that were not ours. In fighting others, we were actually fighting ourselves, unaware for the most part of the evil with respect to which we were at once victims and accessories.
The crime that a mercenary civilization has hitherto perpetrated against childhood is to have set predation above sensitivity and generosity of spirit.
Life as an individual and social adventure was so relentlessly hedged about with obstacles, disillusion and dashed hopes that even rare and wondrous moments of happiness were overwhelmed by cynical mockery born of bitterness and resentment.
Instead of devising a destiny for themselves capable of fulfilling their longing for enfranchisement, servile masses submitted to leaders, elected or self-appointed, who promised them a better life even as they condemned them to poverty and death. Their differences notwithstanding, such sinister figureheads as Hitler, Dollfuss, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco or Mao Zedong were frequently set up as models of everyday behavior. They were, in effect, merely inflated projections of the solid family men and petty office managers who swarm around us like maggots.