The Baiting Society

As I Sat in front of my television set watching the second invasion of Czechoslovakia, this time by the Communist storm troopers, resentment and despair, shame, indignation and the frustrated awareness of my total impotence were racing wildly through the corridors of my mind, like the "hounds of heaven" in the famous Housman poem. I was trying to control my breathing and to clear my throat: my whole body was tense, and in my hands there was a kind of physical longing for the controls of the bomber I had flown against the other Nazis during the War. Then, out of some even darker corner of my psyche, there suddenly arose a monstrous thought: This, if ever, was a case for the use of the atom bomb. Under the impact of intolerable provocation, faced with this cynical baiting of my helplessness and weakness through a combination of total frustration and powerless sense of injustice, I was crossing the border of sanity and falling prey to the obscure forces within a Lee Harvey Oswald, a Hitler or a Sirhan Sirhan.

My own reaction is the answer to all those who wonder how violence has become our daily companion, why students are running amuck in every city of the world. Our consciousness and conscience, our inbred belief in the existence of some kind of honor among men are mercilessly teased, baited, provoked day by day, hour by hour, through the instant audio-visual contact with the world we live in. This world may be no more ugly than it was 50 years ago, but its beastliness was then ignored or unknown to a colossal degree, and this ignorance protected our psyche. But two generations of mass media and communications have exposed both the world to us and us to the world in such a brutal way that our conscience has become an exposed nerve. An adjustment to such a situation becomes not only impossible but immoral: that is why Freud and psychoanalysis are more and more rejected by the young, as Miss Anna Freud herself so courageously pointed out some time ago. In the world of Prague, Biafra, Vietnam and Harlem, can anyone tell me what could possibly be meant by an adjusted man? Brainwashed at best; more likely, a passive accomplice. For the youth of today, to be ill adjusted is a term of praise, a first necessity in terms of dignity, of moral and psychological survival, as well as the first prerequisite to a radical change of the total environment.

Not long ago, I heard an 18-year-old boy say ironically, looking at his father with an unbelievable expression of scorn: "Yeah, he's always been well adjusted."

One of the most absurd arguments advanced against the 16,000 rioting students in Paris last May ran as follows: "We are feeding them, clothing them, we are giving them all the opportunities to learn and to occupy a place in society, then they go and throw stones at us." It is true that 90 percent of the rioters were fils á papa. It is, however, the most stupidly selfish argument ever employed by the French bourgeoisie in blind self-defense. For the so-called French revolution of 1968 had its roots precisely in the fact that the young intellectuals of Nanterre and Paris could no longer stand to be well fed, well clothed, well educated and settled in jobs in a world where 700,000,000 people are suffering from malnutrition. It was said that the rioting students had no purpose in sight. True enough, they were merely vomiting the world.

Being a violent person myself, I am no less aware than other observers of the pathological character of all violence and I would be the last to defend it or to sing its praise. But, on the other hand, we cannot drive people mad and then condemn them for being insane. I am also aware that violence derives either from our own self-righteous conviction that we are absolutely right or from our reaction to others who feel and behave as if they are absolutely right. Such an attitude excludes all margin of tolerance. The belief in one's cause becomes so strong that all other moral considerations are swept aside, usually together with some butchered or burned bodies of men, women and children. My moral convictions become so overwhelming that I no longer let ordinary morality stand in my way. For the holder of absolute truth, everything else ceases to matter. During the last War, I spent five years more or less continuously at the controls of a bomber in England, Abyssinia, Libya, Syria, France and Germany. In 1943, I dive-bombed and missed an enemy submarine. I have often heard of bomber pilots who, years later, experience a recurrent nightmare: They see the victims of their bombing. I suffer from an even more terrible recurrent nightmare: Twenty-six years later, I still dream that I miss that submarine. I wake up screaming in a cold sweat because I have not killed. My anti-Nazi convictions and my belief in what I was fighting for were so absolute that I had become a highly decorated killing machine. Even today, my painfully abstract remorse stems from the fact that I feel no remorse.

Albert Camus has written what to me is one of the two key sentences of our or, for that matter, any other time: "I am against all those who think they are absolutely right." And I may as well quote the other key sentence in the same context: "You condemn to the death penalty a guilty man, but you always carry out the sentence on an innocent one." I know of no greater truth; and yet, as I was watching the rape of Czechoslovakia, I felt so absolutely right in my indignation that I caught myself longing for the absolute weapon.

I do not believe that this is a time when one can have a conscience and be entirely sane. Brutality is merely the opposite pole of this escape from reality; the oversensitive individual always dreams of toughness, of virility, and can become a pathological killer merely to escape from his own feeling of impotence.

My contention is that we are in the midst of the greatest psychological, moral and spiritual crisis that our civilization has ever known. Ideology has become associated with mass murder. Materialistic society finds nowhere to go, except to more of the same, and there is neither God nor man in sight any longer. Humanism is dead and Man, with a capital M, died with it. I myself believe in an extraordinary spiritual revolution and renaissance in the next century, and it probably will be of a scientific origin or if you prefer, a revelation. Man cannot live by man alone. The new civilization will have to find outside help. I do, how-ever, feel that our traditional religions are all deeply associated with our fiasco and that our spiritual rebirth will have very little to do with them.

One of the most obvious reasons for our angst is, of course, the fact that we are truly opening our eyes for the first time. For thousands of years, civilizations prospered on a happy mixture of limited knowledge and unlimited ignorance. The most frightening, shocking single event in Voltaire's life and time was the Calcutta earthquake. Today, an earthquake is a reassuring thing: At least there is one horror for which we are not responsible. We are living in a state of instant and constant awareness. Let me give you an example of the power of the mass media. Last May, in Paris, a few hundred students occupied the Sorbonne. It so happened that while Dean Roche, Chief of Police Grimaud and Sauvageot--the handsome Ché Guevara of the students' revolt--were negotiating inside the building, unknown to them, Radio Luxembourg had its mikes there and every word of the angry discussion was on the air. Within a matter of hours, the 400 students were 16,000 and the May revolution began.

It would, of course, be absurd and totally unacceptable that the realities of the world we live in should be deliberately hidden from us. But it is no less true that we are overexposed. By its very nature, television dwells on dramatic events. There is no show element in peace. Nondrama, the nonhappening, is not something upon which movies, radio and television can feed and prosper. Our conscience and consciousness are therefore constantly bombarded with the worst: The very nature of showmanship, of the spectacular, of the arresting, of the dramatic, is shock. Overemphasis sets in with the necessity to conquer new audiences and to fight the competition of other media. All those who listened to the hysterical radio report on the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy soon found themselves reacting hysterically to the tragedy. Superevents provoke over-reactions. Even the voices of the majority of news commentators in the United States are almost constantly keyed up; they tend to overplay the drama already emphatic enough in itself. The accent is always on tragedy, and the more peaceful and happy aspects of life are largely ignored. There is an old saying in France: "Happy people have no history." There is no story in the absence of drama. We are, therefore, being served day-by-day overdoses of tragedy and we like, through mass media, a permanent show, with the consequence that a lack of entertainment, which was our normal way of life for thousands of years, leaves us in a vacuum. It is not so much the violence on the television screen or in the movies, as is too often said, that leads to crime and violence; it is a craving for a constant happening, the conditioning by the constant dramatic vibration on the screen, which, in the end, equates nondrama with a feeling of non-existence. As often as not, violence in the streets is a form of self-provided entertainment.

I understand that after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, many Hollywood personalities took an oath to renounce violence in the movies in which they star. It may be a valid personal reaction against our gun society, but it has no relevance to the murder of Robert Kennedy. The young Senator was assassinated--probably as was his brother--because his glamorous personality, wealth, power, good looks and unlimited prospects had been overdramatized by mass media to the point that they were beginning to act as provocation on a paranoid personality with an inherent feeling of inferiority and frustration, always on the lookout for dramatic self-assertion. In such a situation, the assassin feels that he has avenged himself and has achieved greatness by his act, and that he has risen above the status of his victim.

As for violence in films, its influence is probably highly overestimated. And can anyone tell me what effect Bonnie and Clyde had on the sadistic behavior of the Chicago police during the convention?

During last spring's riots in Washington, I was fortunate enough to be able to witness an example of a truly curious rapport between the television addicts and the magical box. Several houses were burning around 14th Street. A few blocks from the nearest and clearly visible fire, I saw a crowd in front of a store. The crowd was watching a television set in the window, and do you know what they were looking at? They were looking at a house burning in the neighborhood. They had only to turn their heads to see the fire live, but they obviously preferred to watch it on TV. Maybe they were confident that the network had picked the best fire for them. Or maybe they wanted to see the commercial that would follow. I do not pretend to be able to explain this phenomenon. At one moment, I even began to suspect that the crowd was not watching the fire on the screen but the TV set itself. Or perhaps they were just waiting for someone to break the window, so that they could take the set and the fire home with them.

The power of the transistor radio in the underdeveloped countries is fantastic. It can be argued that Egypt and the whole Arab Middle East are held together only by transistor radio. A few words can throw millions of people into the streets, as happened in Cairo during Nasser's "abdication" speech, and in Paris, in (continued on page 114)Baiting Society(continued from page 104) the Champs Elysées, during De Gaulle's challenging speech against the Communist Party.

The power of the mass media is snowballing through the democratic explosion and coincides with the appearance on the social scene of a completely new and extremely receptive class--youth, with its own economic power and leadership, its own mechanized transport, vocabulary, heroes and tribal organizations, with its more sensitive and militant elements refusing any form of integration. Youth power is in the process of radically changing the patterns of behavior in our society; and the adults are simply unable to meet the challenge of the young and to compete with them, if only because they are almost physiologically incapable of the same reflexes, vitality, eagerness and freshness of outlook. All they seem able to do is to call the police. In such a situation, mass reactions are bound to become endemic and explosive, unpredictable and beyond the grasp of traditional reason. In France, the average age at a mass meeting 35 years ago was 42. Today, it is 24. A huge turnout 40 years ago meant 100,000. people; today, it means nearly 1,000,000. A large minority of this new class, youth, seeks a deliberate alienation from the rest of society, develops new codes of behavior and reinvents something akin to tribalism. The recourse to tribalism--hippies, black angels, psychedelic clans, gangs, sects, each with its own way of living, of dressing, each with its own customs, language, signs and symbols--is a reaction of the individual against the sucking-in pressures of a homogenized society endowed with unlimited power and authority over him. The individual regroups himself within the tribe and tries to create a world of his own. This form of retreat will be prevalent as long as a prosperous society permits such marginal living, which is feeding essentially on surplus and offal: The same forces will become revolutionary when marginal forms of escape living become economically impossible. Add to this the demographic congestion in urban areas and the evidence that our unreconstructed society is largely incapable of coping with the growth of its own birth rate, and it becomes apparent that we will either have to reconstruct the society entirely or establish a police state. Our civilization remains static and clings to sameness, while all its components, from technology to communications media, are in constant change, which can only mean an explosion, a breakdown or rapid, deliberate progress. The whole refuses to follow the changes of its components.

Within the U.S.A., the combined psychological pressures of advertising and of the constant show of wealth surrounding the poor are so strong that they amount to an invitation to looting or to robbery. The baiting never stops. Buy! Consume! You cannot do without this; this is the newest and the best and you must have it! Come on, it's waiting for you! How can we act indignant after that when the ghetto kid, submitted to such a teasing, at the first opportunity goes on a looting spree? America has laid out the rule for the successful consumers' society: Get rich. Yet it refuses both within its national boundaries and throughout the world to play its own game. Willing or not, it finds itself, therefore, constantly baiting, taunting and provoking millions of its own economically abandoned nonconsumers, as well as all the underdeveloped countries. The attitude of the destitute masses of South America, Asia and Africa toward the U.S.A. is that of the average looter toward a Fifth Avenue store.

The alternative to crime would be revolutionary, it would consist of an attempt to overthrow a society that at the same time baits you with its riches and denies you economic access to them. Crime is a form of adjustment to society. It's a pathological way of accepting this society and of answering to its pressures. Crime is not, as is often said, the left hand of idealism: It is the right hand of ignorance.

Each of us can compose his own list of overwhelming forces active as a tease within our baiting society. Authority, for instance, has become a dirty word because of the sheer exhibitionistic, over-active and ever-present aspects of it. For young people everywhere, revolutionary and nonrevolutionary alike, from Moscow to Belgrade, from Prague to Paris, from Chicago to Montreal, authority is the number-one enemy. No wonder: Living has become an exercise in bureaucracy. Individual freedom has all the scope of a pedestrian crossing: Walk, Don't Walk. During the students' May revolt, when spring in Paris was blossoming with slogans on all walls in the flickering light of burning cars, one of the graffiti I read was: "Down with the bureaucracy of living!" It was impossible to find out what the students were fighting for, in terms of actual politically constructive changes. They were merely reacting to the daily baiting of our civilization, reaching for an overexposed and unacceptable reality; and they reminded me once more of Kafka's most moving prophecy, those few words that have been my greatest inspiration as a writer and whose echo can be heard in all my books: "The power of the human scream is so great that it will smash all the iron laws decreed against man."

"La puissance, voilà I'ennemi!"("Power, that's the enemy!") ran another bit of writing on the wall. The individual is surrounded by the evidence of too much implacable power around him--nuclear, economic, military, industrial, mechanized, organized, anonymous, impudent power. The individual either capitulates to the power machine and becomes a kind of "insert one" coin in its entrails or tries to destroy the machine itself, with nothing in mind to replace it. Violence, then, becomes a kind of groping for self-respect, a self-assertion, a proclamation of independence. Victory becomes irrelevant; what counts is the old-fashioned, seldom-heard-today word "honor." The rebellious Jews of the Warsaw ghetto could not hope for any victory over the German war machine. But they attained dignity and honor.

Each of us is exposed day by day to increasing doses of historical fallout. After all, there is no reason a French student should feel guilty and responsible for what happens, let us say, in Biafra. But when a mass-circulation magazine prints on its cover the picture of a tiny skeleton still stirring and staring at you under the caption, "Within two hours this child will be dead," unless you have become completely amorphous, with your sensitivity killed by overexposure and you no longer care or react (which is the first step toward a police state), any human being, and particularly the young, feels like smashing something, a typical reaction of frustration and impotence.

I vividly remember other slogans scribbled on the dirty old walls of Paris: "The word is a born liar," which is an approximate translation of "Le mot ment comme il respire." "The word comes with police protection and tear gas." "Truth cannot be expressed in words without lying." "Unlearn the words: Go back to before ABC." "Stop the word before it makes another million dead." As I write this, I wonder how the politicians and the warmakers everywhere would feel about this. The disillusionment of the young is entirely justified, and the indisputable fact is that the Communists and the capitalists, all the democrats and nondemocrats, all the revolutionaries and conservatives alike have betrayed their beautiful words and promises. Remember "Freedom from fear, freedom from want"? I wonder what happened to them.

To many people, this verbal aggression (concluded on page 200)Baiting Society(continued from page 114) against words may appear as mere literature; but then, what they are really shrugging off is literature itself, which they cannot do without admitting that they have capitulated in their relationship with spiritual values and that those values are in the process of rotting in the vast Marxist and non-Marxist cemetery of "culture." It is characteristic that the leaders of the Paris revolt and most of the rank and file were students of literature and philosophy. Unquestionably, the revolution had its roots in the very dynamics of all artistic creation: the need for self-expression under the onslaught, baiting and pressures by our unacceptable reality. All art and literature is an answer to the taunting or challenge by reality. All craving for justice is an artistic pursuit, a craving for beauty and harmony. Frustration and inability to change the real world can lead both to violence and to artistic creation. This age will probably see more music, art and literature--and more young people, talented or not, devoted to those pursuits--than any other age, simply because there is no other way out. From the furious action painting of Jackson Pollock to Picasso's pictorial aggression against reality, from the theatrical Happening to the students' riots in the streets, the means of self-defense and self-expression may differ vastly, but the motivation is the same: a refusal to accept the taunting of our consciousness and of our conscience by a monstrous environment. Psychodrama, Happening, Living Theater--the riots and violence in our cities were and will continue to be what art and literature have always been: an attempt at a rebirth, a spiritual self-cleansing, a deliberate alienation from the present-day social reality. Art is what is not there but should be there.

To me, the most hopeful sign is that our generation of protest and of negation has outgrown national frontiers, races, creeds and ideologies. It's nothing more than one great big, emotional No! And it unites Christians and atheists alike. Not long ago, I stood in the midst of a crowd of Catholic dissenters near Notre Dame, the day after the Pope's ban on the contraceptive pill was announced. As I stood pushing the mike of my tape recorder toward the white face of a young Dominican priest, these were exactly the words I heard:

"The contraceptive pill means the rebirth of man. It means resurrection. It means the end of genocide; of genocide through hunger, through oppression, through squalor, through ignorance. It means the reassurance that the reborn Jesus will not die of hunger in some small corner of the world. The prohibition of the contraceptive pill is genocide."

My contention is that the real danger to our future is not the violent, rioting youth, still a vocal minority magnified through the mass media, always on the watch for drama. The real danger is our indifferent masses. The pattern of violence is, in my view, insufficient to force our society toward a real change; but its positive aspect is that it may awaken some stupefied, apathetic people. Every Communist and every politician have always and will always speak of the people with sobs of emotion in their voice, and the people have responded with self-righteous self-esteem almost to the point of no return. This passive, cowed, hypnotized majority may still be awakened from its slumber by the so-called violent fringe. Up to now, both in Soviet slaveland and deep between the layers of our Western fat, the people have refused to budge. We hear every day about the rioters and killers in our midst, about the troublemakers, but we never hear a word about the 95 percent of the population who are merely for law and order. The question is: what law and what order? The same as before and more of the same? Then we will soon need a police state to protect our goodies and our rights.