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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER VII: NOBLE LIFE AND COMMON LIFE, OR EFFORT AND INERTIA
Page 5
These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. Training = askesis. These are the ascetics.[4] This apparent digression should not cause surprise. In order to define the actual mass-man, who is as much "mass" as ever, but who wishes to supplant the "excellent, it has been necessary to contrast him with the two pure forms which are mingled in him: the normal mass and the genuine noble or man of effort.
[4]Vide "El Origen deportivo del Estado," in El Espectador, VII, recently published.
Now we can advance more rapidly, because we are now in possession of what, to my thinking, is the key- the psychological equation- of the human type dominant to-day. All that follows is a consequence, a corollary, of that root-structure, which may be summed up thus: the world as organised by the XIXth Century, when automatically producing a new man, has infused into him formidable appetites and powerful means of every kind for satisfying them. These include the economic, the physical (hygiene, average health higher than any preceding age), the civil and the technical (by which I mean the enormous quantity of partial knowledge and practical efficiency possessed by the average man to-day and lacking to him in the past). After having supplied him with all these powers, the XIXth Century has abandoned him to himself, and the average man, following his natural disposition, has withdrawn into himself. Hence, we are in presence of a mass stronger than that of any preceding period, but differing from the traditional type in that it remains, hermetically enclosed within itself, incapable of submitting to anything or anybody, believing itself self-sufficient- in a word, indocile.[5] If things go on as they are at present, it will be every day more noticeable in Europe- and by reflection, throughout the whole world- that the masses are incapable of submitting to direction of any kind. In the difficult times that are at hand for our continent, it is possible that, under a sudden affliction, they may for a moment have the good will to accept, in certain specially urgent matters, the direction of the superior minorities.
[5]On the indocility of the masses, especially of the Spanish masses, I have already spoken in Espana Invertebrada (1922), and I refer the reader to what is there said.
But even that good will will result in failure. For the basic texture of their soul is wrought of hermetism and indocility; they are from birth deficient in the faculty of giving attention to what is outside themselves, be it fact or person. They will wish to follow someone, and they will be unable. They will want to listen, and will discover they are deaf. On the other hand, it is illusory to imagine that the mass-man of to-day, however superior his vital level may be compared with that of other times, will be able to control, by himself, the process of civilisation. I say process, and not progress. The simple process of preserving our present civilisation is supremely complex, and demands incalculably subtle powers. Ill-fitted to direct it is this average man who has learned to use much of the machinery of civilisation, but who is characterised by root-ignorance of the very principles of that civilisation. I reiterate to the reader who has patiently followed me up to this point, the importance of not giving to the facts enunciated a primarily political significance. On the contrary, political activities, of all those in public life the most efficient and the most visible, are the final product of others more intimate, more impalpable. Hence, political indocility would not be so grave did it not proceed from a deeper, more decisive intellectual indocility. In consequence, until we have analysed this latter, the thesis of this essay will not stand out in its final clarity.