(The Nationalist, 15 November 2004)
In February 1933, the Irish chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Leo T. McCauley, wrote to Foreign Affairs in Dublin about the rise of one Adolf Hitler. He described him as ‘a mystical and mysterious figure: no one knows what his principles and true policy really are’. McCauley reported on a public meeting addressed by him, stating, ‘He shouted at the top of his voice, becoming almost inarticulate with excitement before each sentence was well begun, and frequently being quite incoherent before the sentence was ended…. All the foreign observers who were present… agreed that he simply raved. Yet his speech was received by the audience with the wildest enthusiasm’. With the benefit of hindsight, we feel amazed that people followed him. He projected himself as a political messiah and people gave him the kind of loyalty which should be given to no one but God.
Mussolini came to power in 1922. ‘Everything in the State, for the State, and by the State; nothing outside, or above, or against the State’, he said, giving a good definition of totalitarianism. How did people ever fall for such a posturing buffoon? But they did.
Similarly with Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat: he said, ‘The only morality is the morality of the class struggle’. That opened the way to the Gulag. For a time, communism seemed all-powerful, but now it is gone, although its legacy of division and death is not yet exhausted. Those pseudo-messiahs brought their countries to ruin, and much of the world with them.
Perhaps we, too, have a false messiah: the market with its disciples of advertising and economics. Maybe it has become totalitarian, an absolute, and too bad about the poor, the redundant, those who don’t get a fair price for their produce, or whose currency is devalued through speculation.
Since Margaret Thatcher, we have gone overboard on efficiency and productivity at the expense of human relations. People often come home from work exhausted, with little energy for anything except to have something to eat, flop in front of the TV, and then go to bed. The quality of family life suffers.
Some years ago, a builder, asked about the rise in house prices, said, ‘Most households now have two incomes, so people can afford to pay more’. It’s a case of charging what the market will bear.
We sometimes sacrifice the quality of family life for the sake of what we call a higher standard of living. Are we not in fact talking about a higher standard of material living, with a lower standard of human living? People often feel trapped in such situations. They want to get out of them, but feel they can’t. The question for us may be: where do our loyalties lie? Perhaps we are being as gullible as people of earlier times, and are insufficiently questioning about what advertising and marketing agents present to us as our good.