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

Ethics, Economics, and Government 181
of pseudo-democracy, or votes for everybody, which destroys responsibility
by allowing the leaders to blame their mistakes on the electorate. “A
minister of State who accepts and undertakes a public duty on the understanding
that if he fails he will be impeached and possibly shot, or at least
discharged and discredited, is a responsible minister” (Everybody’s Political
33). “Better one dictator standing up responsible before the world for
the good and evil he does than a dirty little dictator in every street responsible
to nobody,” as Old Hipney declares (On the Rocks 6:719). The dictator
could not hide behind sham ruses; his rule must be based on competence.
This was naive of Shaw. It was extraordinarily naive in the case of
Stalin. He seems to have had no sense of the diligence with which Hitler
and Mussolini developed their protective, artificial “godhead” or the effectiveness
of military terror in convincing those initially reluctant to go
along with it. He imagined that with the traditional garments of authority
torn away the dictator would actually be forced into something closer to
genuine democracy. This is certainly a flaw in his thinking, but it is not the
mistake of authoritarianism; rather, it is a betrayal of his hidden anarchism.
He believed that with the bandages of idolatry stripped from their
eyes, the people would, acting in their own self-interest, demand responsible
leadership. He expected something not unlike Adam Smith’s invisible
hand to restrain the leaders. He also believed of rulers what he believed of
everyone: that you get the best of them by appealing to their consciences.
“All this country or any country has to stand between it and blue hell,”
Hipney says, “is the consciences of them that are capable of governing
it” (6:721). He thought the masses, together with their own consciences,
would always keep the dictators in line. Either humanity itself—natural
democracy—or the devotion of the leaders to the genuine improvement
of humanity—“vocation”—was, in Shaw’s view, the ultimate safeguard
against tyranny. As long as the people were not blinded by self-perverting
ideals, they could be counted on to rein in ambition and make power serve
their needs. We can see, with the wisdom of our century’s experience to aid
us, that Shaw was himself blinded by his own ideals. His blindness is remarkable
because he understood it so well in others and even—in the abstract—in
himself. He knew that we all believe what we want to believe,
and he wanted to believe in the essential goodness of human beings. He
knew that we are easily turned from the purposes of the Life Force, but he
was certain that so long as we are not deluded by ideals or deflected from
the general good by self-interest, we would return to the quest for godhead.
Just as he thought that the Ulster Protestants would join with their