GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THEORY OF FASCISM 629
obvious, learn to master his appetites and restrain his
passions. The plain man listened to the words of the
flatterer, and, aspiring to live the higher life, transformed
himself from a savage into a clerk. The process, Mandeville
remarked, is known as civilization. Tamed by his own
conceit, man was now fit to live in society. As a social animal
he regarded as virtuous every action on the part of others
by which the society to which he belonged was benefited,
and stigmatized as vicious the indulgence of private
appetites irrespective of the public good.
But the skilful politicians who had planned the deception
from the beginning had taken good care to ensure that
the good of society should be identical with their own
Uncivilized man is . man, but
advantage. ungovernable
man tamed and tractable, with the bees of social virtue
and social service buzzing in his citizen's bonnet, is at
once the prop and the dupe of unscrupulous governments.
"From which," as Mandeville says, "it is evident that the
first rudiments of morality broached by skilful politicians
to make men useful to each other as well as tractable, were
chiefly contrived that the ambitious might reap the more
benefit from, and govern vast numbers of them with the
greater ease ahd security/ 9
Nietzsche's Ethics. This line of thought is developed
by Nietzsche. In Beyond Good and EM he launches an attack
upon utilitarian morals. Utilitarian morality is, he maintains,
merely the herd instinct in the individual. We
bestow moral approval upon those forms of character and
disposition which benefit us personally, or which benefit
the herd to which we belong, and we designate with the
name of "virtuous those actions of which we. approve.
of fear. It is because we are
Morality is also the offspring
afraid of offending public opinion and incurring the
censure of the herd that we refrain from actions of which
the herd disapproves. There is nothing very new in these
ideas. They are, indeed, the ordinary stock-in-trade of
the subjectivist and relativist themes of morals already