SP, June 5, 2005

HUMANITY
A True Story Full of Contradictions
A.H.Fuerstenthal

From the word “go”, the human being is a difficult proposition to understand: By its body bound to Nature and by its mind related to a vague compound of eternity, truth, meaning, and value. A veritable contradiction in constituents. No wonder that every individual suffers under such confusion in various forms: Anxiety, depression, inhibitions, feelings of loss and inadequacy.

If this is the fatally pathological condition of individuals, by their merging into communities little is gained and new problems arise. How to form a community without sacrificing personal character, freedom, spontaneity? What method of communal structuring should be chosen, what style of government, what type of ideology?

Here arises the question of Right and Left. These are not merely political alternatives, but tendencies deeply rooted in human nature.

The Left, being close to the heart, is everything the heart could desire: Harmony, equality, comradeship, collaboration, altruism, a self-effacing attitude and a sincere interest in the advancement of community aims.

In contrast, the Right expresses everything in human nature which is mean: Autocracy, exploitation, discrimination, ambition, envy, competitiveness and the ruthless domain over the less gifted portion of contemporary mankind.

However, when it comes to individual and collective survival, the Right surpasses the Left. Under rightist pressure, the jobs are done, inventiveness reigns, improvisation functions, effort is spent naturally. Fearing joblessness on one hand and aspiring to riches on the other, makes everybody strive for perfection.

On the Left, there is security, justice, and an admirable ideological background. Yet, the lack of positive or negative stimulation, the lack of differentiation and challenge have a demoralizing effect. Action becomes perfunctory, production shoddy, and the general mood fatalistic.

In theory, the Right is beastly and the Left sympathetic. But in practice, the Left is not functioning. In the fields as well as on factory floors, production quotas have to be enforced and the dream of free cooperation turns into a nightmare of control and suppression.

Thus, the beautiful Left turns into an ugly self-defying tyranny, the harshness and drabness of which far outflank capitalist brutality.

True enough, capitalist civilization may still continue to be a sort of jungle with survival of the fittest and selection by discrimination. Yet, this shocking renewal of primitive human schemes may still be the most effective, if not the only one, to bring about happiness.

Undoubtedly, material happiness is never free of bad conscience. Modern capitalism does not feel at ease without a leftist opposition. But where to draw the line? Right and Left have to live together in peace, however contradictory they are. Deep down, the human being, whatever his stage of progress, will have to face up to the eternal antagonism of mind and body, i.e. of ideals and reality.