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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 24
All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost, is lost without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality. This is true in every order, even in science, in spite of science being of its nature an escape from life. (The majority of men of science have given themselves to it through fear of facing life. They are not clear heads; hence their notorious ineptitude in the presence of any concrete situation.) Our scientific ideas are of value to the degree in which we have felt ourselves lost before a question; have seen its problematic nature, and have realised that we cannot find support in received notions, in prescriptions, proverbs, mere words. The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands bloodstained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes. Politics is much more of a reality than science, because it is made up of unique situations in which a man suddenly finds himself submerged whether he will or no. Hence it is a test which allows us better to distinguish who are the clear heads and who are the routineers. Caesar is the highest example known of the faculty of getting to the roots of reality in a time of fearful confusion, in one of the most chaotic periods through which humanity has passed. And as if Fate had wished to stress still more the example, she set up, by the side of Caesar's, a magnificent "intellectual" head, that of Cicero, a man engaged his whole life long in making things confused. An excess of good fortune had thrown out of gear the political machinery of Rome. The city by the Tiber, mistress of Italy, Spain, Northern Africa, the classic and Hellenistic East, was on the point of falling to pieces. Its public institutions were municipal in character, inseparable from the city, like the hamadryads attached under pain of dissolution to the trees they have in tutelage. The health of democracies, of whatever type and range, depends on a wretched technical detail- electoral procedure. All the rest is secondary. If the regime of the elections is successful, if it is in accordance with reality, all goes well; if not, though the rest progresses beautifully, all goes wrong. Rome at the beginning of the 1st Century B.C. is all-powerful, wealthy, with no enemy in front of her. And yet she is at the point of death because she persists in maintaining a stupid electoral system. An electoral system is stupid when it is false. Voting had to take place in the city. Citizens in the country could not take part in the elections. Still less those who lived scattered over the whole Roman world.