It is the specific danger of all forms of government based on equality that the moment the structure of lawfulness—within whose framework the experience of equal power receives its meaning and direction—breaks down or is transformed, the powers among equal men cancel each other out and what is left is the experience of absolute impotence. Out of the conviction of one’s own impotence and the fear of the power of all others comes the will to dominate, which is the will of the tyrant.
Of the two European suspicions—that American anti-Stalinists are simply more sophisticated and less powerful defenders of the status quo, and that they may be only an ideological “superstructure” for their country’s national interests in foreign politics—the one seems to be as well founded as the other is unwarranted. Interminable discussion by anti-Stalinists of the moot question as to whether Soviet Russia is a socialist country has somewhat blurred the fact that anti-Stalinists, along with other Americans, are fundamentally and sincerely opposed to any government that functions with the help of concentration camps and secret police, that aims at the total domination of society and the total humiliation of man.
One can say that to some extent fascism has added a new variation to the old art of lying—the most devilish variation—that of lying the truth.
What interested me far more were the moods of intensity—what G. K. Chesterton had called the sense of ‘absurd good news’. From the beginning, one thing seemed basically clear to me: that in these states of enriched consciousness, these states in which it seems self-evident that life is good, we begin to grasp what life is all about.
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