Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

500 / ANARCHISM
lem could be seen in all its simplicity and realism by the simplest worker and peasant,
the existing economic system would not last a day longer. The creation of a new economic
system would take more than the following day; but it would be better to begin
with a revolution, as in Spain, than to go through the slow-Illotion agony of a
so-called "transitional period." A transitional period is merely a bureaucratic device
for postponing the inevitable ...
The society I desire and will and plan is a leisure society-a society giving full
opportunity for the education and development of the mind. Mind only requires time
and space-to differentiate itself. The worst conditions of intellectual uniformity
and stupidity are created by conditions of poverty and lack of leisure. The ordinary
man under our present unjust system has to have his education stopped before his
mind is fully opened. From the age of fourteen he is caught up in an endless treadmill;
he has neither time nor opportunity to feed his undeveloped senses-he must
snatch at the diuretic pabulum of the newspapers and the radio, and as a consequence,
tread the mill with more urgency ...
I would define the anarchist as the man who, in his manhood, dares to resist the
authority of the father; who is no longer content to be governed by a blind unconscious
identification of the leader and the father and by the inhibited instincts which
alone make such an identification possible. Freud ... sees the origin of the heroic
myth in such a longing for independence. "It was then, perhaps, that some individual,
in the exigency of his longing, may have been moved to free himself from the group
and take over the father's part. He who did this was the first epic poet; and the advance
was achieved in his imagination. This poet disguised the truth with lies in accordance
with his longing. He invented the heroic myth. The hero was a man who by
himself had slain the father-the father who still appeared in the myth as a totemistic
monster.Just as the father had been the boy's first ideal, so in the hero who aspires
to the father's place the poet now created the first ego ideal." But the further step
which the anarchist now takes is to pass from myth and imagination to reality and action.
He comes of age; he disowns the father; he lives in accordance with his own
ego-ideal. He becomes conscious of his individuality ...
The obsessive fear of the father which is the psychological basis of tyranny is at
the same time the weakness of which the tyrant takes advantage. We all know the
spectacle of the bully goaded into sadistic excesses by the very docility of his victim.
The tyrant or dictator acts in exactly the same way. It is not psychologically credible
that he should act in any other way. The only alternative to the principle of leadership
is the principle of co-operation or mutual aid; not the father-son relationship