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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 42
The only thing opposed to it is the prejudice of the old "nations," the idea of the nation as based on the past. We are shortly to see if Europeans are children of Lot's wife who persist in making history with their heads turned backwards. Our reference to Rome, and in general to the man of the ancient world, has served us as a warning; it is very difficult for a certain type of man to abandon the idea of the State which has once entered his head. Happily, the idea of the national State which the European, consciously or not, brought into the world, is not the pedantic idea of the philologues which has been preached to him. I can now sum up the thesis of this essay. The world to-day is suffering from a grave demoralisation which, amongst other symptoms, manifests itself by an extraordinary rebellion of the masses, and has its origin in the demoralisation of Europe. The causes of this latter are multiple. One of the main is the displacement of the power formerly exercised by our Continent over the rest of the world and over itself. Europe is no longer certain that it rules, nor the rest of the world that it is being ruled. Historic sovereignty finds itself in a state of dispersion. There is no longer a "plenitude of the times," for this supposes a clear, prefixed, unambiguous future, as was that of the XIXth Century. Then men thought they knew what was going to happen to-morrow. But now once more the horizon opens out towards new unknown directions, because it is not known who is going to rule, how authority is going to be organised over the world. Who, that is to say, what people or group of peoples; consequently, what ethnic type, what ideology, what systems of preferences, standards, vital movements. No one knows towards what centre human things are going to gravitate in the near future, and hence the life of the world has become scandalously provisional. Everything to-day is done in public and in private-men in one's inner conscience- is provisional, the only exception being certain portions of certain sciences . He will be a wise man who puts no trust in all that is proclaimed, upheld, essayed, and lauded at the present day. All that will disappear as quickly as it came. All of it, from the mania for physical sports (the mania, not the sports themselves) to political violence; from "new art" to sun-baths at idiotic fashionable watering-places. Nothing of all that has any roots; it is all pure invention, in the bad sense of the word, which makes it equivalent to fickle caprice. It is not a creation based on the solid substratum of life; it is not a genuine impulse or need. In a word, from the point of view of life it is false.