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

The Will and Its Responsibilities 65
cause the poor would certainly favor it, and they had the advantage of
numbers. History has given the lie to that comforting illusion. As the
American dream has come more and more to be the dream of something
for nothing, its power over the imaginations of the poor has increased. In
this country the poor reject equality in favor of meretricious fantasies, and
the most popular method of redistributing income is the lottery.
Worse, the artificial distinctions created by unequal income have the
malignant effect of becoming real distinctions. The illusion that certain
people must get more because they deserve more is a self-fulfilling prophecy:
those with more become better and those with less become worse.
Society as a whole suffers because its average level has been artificially
suppressed. The irony is complex. First, what Shaw called “the Anarchist
spirit” is possible only under a rigid socialist organization because the economic
anarchism of capitalism produces multiple tyrannies (“The Impossibilities
of Anarchism” 23). Not only does the way to communism lie
through individualism, but genuine individualism is possible only after
“the most resolute and uncompromising” communism. What is most fearful
about the principle of equality is its pitiless exposure of natural inequality.
Here as elsewhere, idealist illusions that seem benign are really
pernicious.
The Ideal of Justice
The illusion that the world can be divided into the deserving and the undeserving
is the foundation of the most sacred of ideals: the ideal of justice.
But there is no such thing as economic justice because there is no such
thing as justice. There are only various more or less arbitrary and conventional
ways of dealing with conflicts between individuals in a given community.
Since there are no independent scales—apart from each person’s
own preference—for weighing one individual’s “worth” or “deserts”
against another’s, it is sensible to treat all equally, to grant moral as well as
social and economic equality. This is precisely Shaw’s position, most thoroughly
described in the preface to Major Barbara, where he imagines a
society stripped of the illusion of justice, in the moral as well as economic
spheres. Such a society cannot justify either the economic punishment of
poverty or any of the other tortures our penal ingenuity has devised. The
punishment of poverty makes its victims worse, not better, and so, believed
Shaw, does every other kind of punishment. Again, the victims of the system
are not united in opposition to it. The illusion of justice—the fantasy