Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

Ethics, Economics, and Government 169
wealth. The authority of the tertiaries in Back to Methuselah, like that of
Andrew Undershaft and Too True To Be Good’s Private Meek, derives from
competence. There is a reality behind superstitious idolatry of rich persons:
it is the power of money, which is the power to deprive others of a
livelihood. We obey rich people for the same reason that we obey the thief
who puts a pistol to our heads. “But that is not obedience to authority: it is
submission to a threat. Real authority has nothing to do with money” (Intelligent
Woman’s Guide 71).
Competent or otherwise, the rich will use their power to maintain their
own privileges. Indeed, one of the worst aspects of the exploitative capitalist
system is that its evils are self-perpetuating. This, Shaw always insisted,
was not because the capitalists and landlords are evil but because they, like
the rest of us, are subject to the enormous power of the will-to-believe.
People believe mostly what they want to believe.
If by inequality of income you give your doctors, your lawyers, your
clergymen, your landlords, or your rulers an overwhelming economic
interest in any sort of belief or practice, they will immediately
begin to see all the evidence in favor of that sort of belief and practice,
and become blind to all the evidence against it. Every doctrine that
will enrich doctors, lawyers, landlords, clergymen, and rulers will be
embraced by them eagerly and hopefully; and every doctrine that
threatens to impoverish them will be mercilessly criticized and rejected.
(Intelligent Woman’s Guide 498)
Natural Eugenics
The artificial inequality produced by property and rent is the enemy of the
Life Force, as well as of present social welfare. If the human race is to be
improved—and it needs improvement—we must be better bred. We must
concern ourselves with eugenics. That word has acquired some highly unpleasant
baggage, so we need to explain carefully what it is that Shaw
meant by the term, which is capable of producing near-hysterical reactions
in otherwise levelheaded people. These people seem to believe that because
eugenics was evoked to justify Nazi genocide, eugenics must necessarily be
evil. The well-intentioned people who wished to rid the world of congenital
defects cannot be held responsible for racists who promoted genocide,
and the attempt to tar Shaw with that brush is simply stupid. His statements
on eugenics were consistent throughout his life: he maintained,
first, that better breeding was essential and, second, that only the Life