Substances move, under pressure, to extreme positions and, when they shift positions, shift from one extreme to the other. Men under pressure are drained of their shadings of spirit, of their sympathy (which they can no more give than get), of their serenity, their sweetness, their simplicity, and their subtlety. Their reactions are structuralized; like rubber balls (which we say have “life” in them because they react in such lively fashion to the living impulse outside them), the harder they are bounced, the higher they go. Such men, when they are told not to cut down a tree, won’t cut down a tree, but when they are not told not to cut down a man, they may cut down a man.
The German who is dedicated to instant self-immolation for the sake of Germany is the same German whose day-to-day egotism amazes the world. This egotism, always “idealized” (that is, romanticized), is, as has often been observed, the very heart of German philosophy; but it is also the basis of the habitual callousness of ordinary life. It is as if there were, in the human heart, only so much selflessness; pressure requires so much of it of the Germans that they are left with almost none for volition.
I know that the unconcern for others displayed, say, by the American who plays a hotel-room radio late at night, is everywhere common in an individualistic civilization except, perhaps, among the English; but nowhere, not even among the English, are “manners” as rigidly emphasized as they are among the Germans, and nowhere as among these people who swarm to tribal sacrifice have I seen men so invariably fail to offer old women their seats in busses, streetcars, or trains. Nowhere have I seen so many old men and women staggering through train sheds with heavy suitcases and never an offer of assistance from the empty-handed, nowhere such uniform disinclination to assist on the scene of an accident or to intervene between children fighting on the street. But the service in German hotels, restaurants, and stores is superb. One “minds one’s own business” in the small affairs of the street, in the larger affairs of the job or the family, in the great affairs of the State.
Grimly preoccupied with themselves; deadly serious and deadly dull (only the Germans could have been unbored by Hitler); tense, hurried, unrelaxed; purpose-bedeviled, always driven somewhere to do something; taking the siesta like Communion, with determined, urgent intent; sneering, and not always genteelly, at the Frenchman sitting “doing nothing” at his cafe (wie Gott in Frankreich, “like God in France,” is the German expression for “carefree”), at the Italian talking his head off over his endless dinner; incapable of quiet without melancholy or frustrated fury; insatiably hungry for the heights or the depths, stone sober or roaring drunk; forever insisting that man is born to suffer—and then begrudging the suffering; unresponsive and over-reactive; stodgy and unstable; uncalm, the inventors and prime practitioners of “stomach trouble”; tormented, exhausted, unable to remain fully awake unless they are angry or hilarious—these, with more than a little hyperbole, with millions of exceptions and contradictions and still more millions of variations, are the ways and the woes of men under pressure.
Men under pressure are first dehumanized and only then demoralized, not the other way around. Organization and specialization, system, subsystem, and supersystem are the consequence, not the cause, of the totalitarian spirit. National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists.
Freedom is nothing but the habit of choice. Now choice is remarkably wide in this life. Each day begins with the choice of tying one’s left or right shoelace first, and ends with the choice of observing or ignoring the providence of God. Pressure narrows choice forcibly. Under light pressure men sacrifice small choices lightly. But it is only under the greatest pressure that they sacrifice the greatest choices, because choice, and choice alone, informs them that they are men and not machines.
The ultimate factor in choosing is common sense, and it is common sense that men under pressure lose fastest, cut off as they are (in besieged “Peoria”) from the common condition. The harder they are pressed, the harder they reason; the harder they must reason. But they tend to become unreasonable men; for reasonableness is reason in the world, and “Peoria” is out of this world.
The besieged intellect operates furiously; the general intelligence atrophies. Theories are evolved of the grandest order and the greatest complexity, requiring only the acceptance of the nonworlds, the Ideas, in which they arise. The two extremist doctrines that have seized hold of our time—Marx’s, denying that there is anything in man, and Freud’s, denying that there is anything outside—are Made in Germany. If you will only accept Marx’s “human nature has no reality” or Freud’s “conscience is nothing but the dread of the community,” you will find them both irresistibly scientific.
In such exquisitely fabricated towers a man may live (or even a whole society), but he must not look over the edge or he will see that there is no foundation. The fabrication is magnificent; the German is matchless in little things, reckless only in big ones, in the fundamental, fateful matters which, in his preoccupation, he has overlooked. That a Wagner should be a vulgar anti-Semite (or stand on his head, or wear a ring in his nose, or whatever) is one thing; he was “only a genius.” But that one of Germany’s two greatest historians, Treitschke, should be a ravening chauvinist, that the other, Mommsen, should find in Julius Caesar “the complete and perfect man”—these are something else. Max Weber could be “the father of sociology,” but he could not see what was sociologically unhealthy in the institution of student dueling.
Who is this Einstein, who was “only a scientist” when he conceived the atomic bomb and now, in his old age, sees what he has done and weeps? He is the German specialist, who had always “minded his”—high—“business” and was no more proof against romanticism than his tailor, who had always minded his low business. He is the finished product of pressure, the uneducated expert, like the postal clerk in Kronenberg whose method of moistening stamps on the back of his hand is infallible. The German mind, encircled and, under pressure of encirclement, stratified, devours itself in the production of lifeless theories of man and society, deathless methods of licking postage stamps, and murderous machinery. For the rest—which is living—the German has to depend upon his ideals.