IN reality, however, it is out of the power either of heads or of hands to alter in any way the destiny of machine-technics, for this has developed out of inward spiritual necessities and is now correspondingly maturing towards its fulfilment and end. Today we stand on the summit, at the point when the fifth act is beginning. The last decisions are taking place, the tragedy is closing.Every high Culture is a tragedy. The history of mankind as a whole is tragic. But the sacrilege and the catastrophe of the Faustian are greater than all others, greater than anything �schylus or Shakespeare ever imagined. The creature is rising up against its creator. As once the microcosm Man against Nature, so now the microcosm Machine is revolting against Nordic Man. The lord of the World is becoming the slave of the Machine, which is forcing him � forcing us all, whether we are aware of it or not � to follow its course. The victor, crashed, is dragged to death by the team.
At the commencement of the twentieth century the aspect of the "world" on this small planet is somewhat of this sort. A group of nations of Nordic blood under the leadership of British, Germans, French, and Americans commands the situation.
Their political power depends on their wealth, and their wealth consists in their
industrial strength. But this in turn is bound up with the existence of coal. The
Germanic peoples, in particular, are secured by what is almost a monopoly of the
known coal-fields, and this has led them to a multiplication of their populations that is
without parallel in all history. On the ridges of the coal, and at the focal points of the
lines of communication radiating therefrom, is collected a human mass of monstrous
size, bred by machine-technics, working for it, and living on it. To the other peoples
whether in the form of colonies or of nominally independent states � is assigned the role of providing the raw material and receiving the products. This division of function is secured by armies and navies, the upkeep of which presupposes industrial wealth, and which have been fashioned by so thorough a technique that they, too, work by the pressing of a button. Once again the deep relationship, almost identity, of politics, war, and economics discloses itself. The degree of military power is dependent on the intensity of industry. Countries industrially poor are poor all round; they, therefore, cannot support an army or wage a war; therefore they are politically impotent; and, therefore, the workers in them, leaders and led alike, are pawns in the economic policy of their opponents.
In comparison with the masses of executive hands � who are the only part of the picture that discontent will look upon � the increasing value of the leadership-work of the few creative heads (undertakers, organizers, discoverers, engineers) is no longer comprehended and valued;1 in so far as it is so at all, practical America rates it highest, and Germany, "the land of poets and thinkers," lowest. The imbecile phrase "The wheels would all be standing still, Did thy mighty arm so will" beclouds the minds of chatterers and scribblers. That even a sheep could bring about, if it were to fall into the machinery. But to invent these wheels and set them working so as to provide that "strong arm" with its living, that is something which only a few born thereto can achieve.
These uncomprehended and hated leaders, the "pack" of the strong personalities, have a different psychology from this. They have not lost the old triumph.feeling of the beast of prey as it holds the quivering victim in its claws, the feeling of Columbus when he saw land on the horizon, the feeling of Moltke at Sedan as he watched the circle of his batteries completing itself down by Illy and sealing the victory. Such moments, such peaks of human experience, the shipbuilder, too, enjoys when a huge liner slides down the ways, and the inventor when his machine is run up and found to "go splendidly," or when his first Zeppelin leaves the ground.
But it is of the tragedy of the time that this unfettered human thought can no longer grasp its own consequences. Technics has become as esoteric as the higher mathematics which it uses, while physical theory has refined its intellectual abstractions from phenomena to such a pitch that (without clearly perceiving the fact) it has reached the pure foundations of human knowing. The mechanization of the world has entered on a phase of highly dangerous over-tension. The picture of the earth, with its plants, animals, and men, has altered. In a few decades most of the great forests have gone, to be turned into news-print, and climatic changes have been thereby set afoot which imperil the land-economy of whole populations. Innumerable animal species have been extinguished, or nearly so, like the bison; whole races of humanity have been brought almost to vanishing-point, like the North American Indian and the Australian.
All things organic are dying in the grip of organization. An artificial world is
permeating and poisoning the natural. The Civilization itself has become a machine
1 Decline of the West, English edition, Vol. II, pp. 504 et seq. 2 Decline of the West, English edition, Vol. I, pp. 420 et seq. that does, or tries to do, everything in mechanical fashion. We think only in horsepower now; we cannot look at a waterfall without mentally turning it into electric power; we cannot survey a countryside full of pasturing cattle without thinking of its exploitation as a source of meat-supply; we cannot look at the beautiful old handwork of an unspoilt primitive people without wishing to replace it by a modern technical process. Our technical thinking must have its actualization, sensible or senseless. The luxury of the machine is the consequence of a necessity of thought. In last analysis, the machine is a symbol, like its secret ideal, perpetual motion � a spiritual and intellectual, but no vital necessity.
It is beginning to contradict even economic practice in many ways. Already their divorce is being foreshadowed everywhere. The machine, by its multiplication and its refinement, is in the end defeating its own purpose. In the great cities the motor-car has by its numbers destroyed its own value, and one gets on quicker on foot. In Argentine, Java, and elsewhere the simple horse-plough of the small cultivator has shown itself economically superior to the big motor implement, and is driving the latter out. Already in many tropical regions the black or brown man with his primitive ways of working is a dangerous competitor to the modern plantation-technique of the white. And the white worker in old Europe and North America is becoming uneasily inquisitive about his work.
It is, of course, nonsense to talk, as it was fashionable to do in the nineteenth century, of the imminent exhaustion of the coal-fields within a few centuries and of the consequences thereof � here, too, the materialistic age could not but think materially. Quite apart from the actual saving of coal by the substitution of petroleum and water-power, technical thought would manage ere long to discover and open up still other and quite different sources of power. It is not worth while thinking ahead so far in time. For the West European-American technics will itself have ended by then. No stupid trifle like the absence of material would be able to hold up this gigantic evolution. So long as the thought working inside it is on its heights, so long will it be able without fail to produce the means for its purposes. But how long will it stay on these heights? Even on the present scale our technical processes and installations, if they are to be maintained, require, let us say a hundred thousand outstanding brains, as organizers and discoverers and engineers. These must be strong � nay, even creative � talents, enthusiasts for their work, and formed for it by a steeling of years� duration at great expense. Actually, it is just this calling that has for the last fifty years irresistibly attracted the strongest and ablest of the white youth. Even the children play with technical things. In the urban classes and families, whose sons chiefly come into consideration in this connexion, there was already a tradition of comfort and culture, so that the normal preconditions were already provided for that mature and autumnal product, technical intellectuality.
But all this is changing in the last decades, in all the countries where large-scale industry is of old standing. The Faustian thought begins to be sick of machines. A weariness is spreading, a sort of pacifism of the battle with Nature. Men are returning to forms of life simpler and nearer to Nature; they are spending their time in sport instead of technical experiments. The great cities are becoming hateful to them, and they would fain get away from the pressure of soulless facts and the clear cold atmosphere of technical organization. And it is precisely the strong and creative talents that are turning away from practical problems and sciences and towards pure speculation. Occultism and Spiritualism, Hindu philosophies, metaphysical inquisitiveness under Christian or pagan colouring, all of which were despised in the Darwinian period, are coming up again. It is the spirit of Rome in the Age of Augustus. Out of satiety of life, men take refuge from civilization in the more primitive parts of the earth, in vagabondage, in suicide. The flight of the born leader from the Machine is beginning. Every big entrepreneur has occasion to observe a falling-off in the intellectual qualities of his recruits. But the grand technical development of the nineteenth century had been possible only because the intellectual level was constantly becoming higher. Even a stationary condition, short of an actual falling off, is dangerous and points to an ending, however numerous and however well schooled may be the hands ready for work. And how is it with them? The tension between work of leadership and work of execution has reached the level of a catastrophe. The importance of the former, the economic value of every real personality in it, has become so great that it is invisible and incomprehensible to the majority of the underlings. In the latter, the work of the hands, the individual is now entirely without significance. Only numbers matter. In the consciousness of this unalterable state of things, aggravated, poisoned, and financially exploited by egoistic orators and journalists, men are so forlorn that it is mere human nature to revolt against the role for which the machine (not, as they imagine, its
possessors) earmarks most of them. There is beginning, in numberless forms � from sabotage, by way of strike, to suicide � the mutiny of the Hands against their destiny, against the machine, against the organized life, against anything and everything. The organization of work, as it has existed for thousands of years, based on the idea of "collective doing" and the consequent division of labour between leaders and led, heads and hands, is being disintegrated from below. But "mass" is no more than a negation (specifically, a negation of the concept of organization) and not something viable in itself. An army without officers is only a superfluous and forlorn herd of men.1 A chaos of brickbats and scrap-iron is a building no more. This mutiny, worldwide, threatens to put an end to the possibility of technical economic work. The leaders may take to flight, but the led, become superfluous, are lost. Their numbers are their death. The third and most serious symptom of the collapse that is beginning lies, however, in what I may call treason to technics. What I am referring to is known to everyone, but it has never been envisaged in its entirety, and consequently its fateful significance has never disclosed itself. The immense superiority that Western Europe and North America enjoyed in the second half of the nineteenth century, in power of
every kind � economic and political, military and financial � was based on an uncontested monopoly of industry. Great industries were only possible in connexion with the coal-fields of these Northern countries. The role of the rest of the world was to absorb the product, and colonial policy was always, for practical purposes, directed to the opening-up of new markets and new sources of raw material, not to the development of new areas of production. There was coal elsewhere, of course, but only the white engineers would have known how to get at it. We were in sole possession, not of the material, but of the methods and the trained intellects required for its utilization. It is this that constitutes the basis of the luxurious living of the white worker � whose income, in comparison with that of the "native,"2 is princely � a circumstance that Marxism has turned to dishonest account, to its own ruin. It is being revenged on us today, for from now on, evolution is going to be complicated by the problem of unemployment. The high level of wages of the white worker, which is today a peril to his very life, rests upon the monopoly that the leaders of industry have created about him.
And then, at the close of last century, the blind will-to-power began to make its
decisive mistakes. Instead of keeping strictly to itself the technical knowledge that
constituted their greatest asset, the "white" peoples complacently offered it to all the world, in every Hochschule, verbally and on paper, and the astonished homage of
Indians and Japanese delighted them. The famous "dissemination of industry" set in,
What the Soviet r�gime has been attempting for the last fifteen years has been nothing but the restoration,
under new names, of the political, military, and economic organization that it destroyed.
Without going further afield, the tension that exists on the matter of wages between the land-worker and the
metal-worker is evidence of this
Including in this term the inhabitants of Russia and parts of southern and south-eastern Europe.
motivated by the idea of getting bigger profits by bringing production into the
marketing area. And so, in place of the export of finished products exclusively, they
began an export of secrets, processes, methods, engineers, and organizers. Even the
inventors emigrate, for Socialism, which could if it liked harness them in its team,
expels them instead. And so presently the "natives" saw into our secrets, understood
them, and used them to the full. Within thirty years the Japanese became technicians
of the first rank, and in their war against Russia they revealed a technical superiority
from which their teachers were able to learn many lessons. Today more or less everywhere in the Far East, India, South America, South Africa � industrial regions are in being, or coming into being, which, owing to their low scales of wages, will face us with a deadly competition. The unassailable privileges of the white races have been thrown away, squandered, betrayed. The others have caught up with their instructors. Possibly � with their combination of "native" cunning and the over-ripe intelligence of their ancient civilizations � they have surpassed them. Where there is coal, or oil,
or water-power, there a new weapon can be forged against the heart of the Faustian
Civilization. The exploited world is beginning to take its revenge on its lords. The innumerable hands of the coloured races � at least as clever, and far less exigent �will shatter the economic organization of the whites at its foundations. The accustomed luxury of the white workman, in comparison with the coolie, will be his doom. The labour of the white is itself coming to be unwanted. The huge masses of men centred in the Northern coal areas, the great industrial works, the capital invested in them, whole cities and districts, are faced with the probability of going under in the competition.
The centre of gravity of production is steadily shifting away from them, especially since even the respect of the coloured races for the white has been ended by the World War. This is the real and final basis of the unemployment that prevails in the white countries. It is no mere crisis, but the beginning of a catastrophe.
For these "coloured" peoples (including, in this context, the Russians) the Faustian technics are in no wise an inward necessity. It is only Faustian man that thinks, feels, and lives in this form. To him it is a spiritual need, not on account of its economic consequences, but on account of its victories � "navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse." For the coloured races, on the contrary, it is but a weapon in their fight against the Faustian civilization, a weapon like a tree from the woods that one uses as house.timber, but discards as soon as it has served its purpose. This machine-technics will end with the Faustian civilization and one day will lie in fragments, forgotten � our railways and steamships as dead as the Roman roads and the Chinese wall, our giant cities and skyscrapers in ruins like old Memphis and Babylon. The history of this technics is fast drawing to its inevitable close.. It will be eaten up from within, like the grand forms of any and every Culture. When, and in what fashion, we know not. Faced as we are with this destiny, there is only one world.outlook that is worthy of us, that which has already been mentioned as the Choice of Achilles � better a short life, lull of deeds and glory, than a long life without content. Already the danger is so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that to cherish any illusion whatever is deplorable. Time does not suffer itself to be halted; there is no question of prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice.
We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honourable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.