For the mass to claim the right to act of itself is then a rebellion
against its own destiny, and because that is what it is doing at present, I
speak of the rebellion of the masses. For, after all, the one thing that can
substantially and truthfully be called rebellion is that which consists in not
accepting one's own destiny, in rebelling against one's self. The rebellion of
the archangel Lucifer would not have been less if, instead of striving to be
God- which was not his destiny- he had striven to be the lowest of the angels-
equally not his destiny. (If Lucifer had been a Russian, like Tolstoi, he would
perhaps have preferred this latter form of rebellion, none the less against God
than the other more famous one.) When
the mass acts on its own, it does so only in one way, for it has no other: it
lynches. It is not altogether by chance that lynch law comes from America, for
America is, in a fashion, the paradise of the masses. And it will cause less
surprise, nowadays, when the masses triumph, that violence should triumph and be
made the one ratio, the one doctrine. It is now some time since I called
attention to this advance of violence as a normal condition.[2] To-day it has reached its full development, and this is a good symptom,
because it means that automatically the descent is about to begin. To-day
violence is the rhetoric of the period, the empty rhetorician has made it his
own. When a reality of human existence has completed its historic course, has
been shipwrecked and lies dead, the waves throw it up on the shores of rhetoric,
where the corpse remains for a long time. Rhetoric is the cemetery of human
realities, or at any rate a Home for the Aged. The reality itself is survived by
its name, which, though only a word, is after all at least a word and preserves
something of its magic power.
