The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

By the early years of the nineteenth century, both the poets and the political idealists were in agreement that crude ego-assertion was the curse of mankind. This is why William Blake welcomed the American Revolution, why Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey supported the French Revolution, why Shelley and Byron denounced tyranny. Suddenly, the solution to mankind’s problems seemed marvellously simple. All were caused by authority – by authority gone mad. Get rid of the kings, the despots and the governments and mankind would enter a golden age. For man, as Rousseau said in the first sentence of his Social Contract, was born free, but was everywhere in chains. Shelley’s analysis of what was wrong with the world in Queen Mab and Swettfoot the Tyrant was in many ways similar to Van Vogt’s Right Man theory. When a stupid man is given power, his ego becomes inflated, and he behaves as if he were the centre of the universe. The simple and obvious solution is to destroy the tyrants like mad dogs, and mankind will again be happy and free – for Rousseau had argued that there had been an age in the past when mankind was innocent, self-sufficient and happy. Then society had created the idea of private property, and all the machinery of oppression and injustice.

For the poets, freedom was a marvellously simple thing:

The mountains look on Marathon –

And Marathon looks on the sea;

And musing there an hour alone,

I dreamed that Greece might still be free…

All that was necessary was to drive out the Turks, and Greece would be free; and in this context, the word means more than merely political freedom; it means what Byron meant in his Sonnet on Chillon:

Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!

Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art.

It was an alluringly simple idea, and it became the basis of the philosophy of socialism. Free man from political tyranny, and Reason will do the rest. Certainly, if we grant Rousseau’s premise that man is born free, then everything else follows. Unfortunately, the theory is dangerously oversimplified. Man is born with certain potentialities for freedom, but he seldom realises them. He is born a slave to his biological appetites and to his emotions. And this means that he may be free without experiencing his freedom. This is Fichte’s paradox: ‘To be free is nothing; to become free is heavenly.’ That is to say, man’s greatest enemy is not tyranny, but his tendency to mechanicalness, to take things for granted.

De Sade was himself a walking demonstration of Rousseau’s fallacy. When the king was guillotined, he wrote a pamphlet entitled: ‘Frenchmen, one more step if you wish to become Republicans!’ In it he argued that, now they had got rid of the king, the next step was to get rid of God. Then they would be free of the greatest tyrant of all, superstition, and man could at last enter the Age of Reason. De Sade printed this discourse in a book called Philosophy in the Bedroom, which is about the defloration and corruption of a virgin. And it is perfectly obvious that the male’s pleasure in deflowering a virgin is the pleasure of the ego asserting its supremacy. The girl lies passively, all her defences down, and the male experiences a sense of triumph as he enters her. There is no difference between this ego-assertion and the ego-assertion that led to the French Revolution. The execution of the king and the rejection of God are irrelevant; they left things exactly as they were before.

This is the problem the idealists were shirking: the problem of power. Their argument was based on the tacit assumption that, if ego-assertion is bad, then the ego itself must be wicked. It ought to be somehow abandoned – allowed to dissolve in the Brotherhood of Man, or in Nature, or in scientific knowledge. But the ego is merely our sense of selfhood, and it seems to reside in the left hemisphere of the brain; it cannot be simply deprived of its share of the partnership. To begin with, the right would find it impossible to operate without it. And, unfortunately, the ego is by nature a tyrant, since its chief task is to get things done. When King Frederick William I of Prussia was walking through Potsdam one morning, he saw a crowd waiting outside the post office – the postmaster had overslept. Frederick smashed the windows to awaken the man, then thrashed him with his own hands. Shelley and Byron would have seen this as an appalling example of tyranny. But Frederick was only concerned with efficiency; he wanted to make Prussia powerful, so that it would never again be reduced to misery by a Thirty Years War. The result was that he became obsessed by his army and by the problem of law and order. Lazy officials were flogged; thieves were hanged. One man who had stolen a few shillings pleaded that his wife and children were starving; Frederick replied: ‘I forgive him the debt; but he must be hanged.’ But he achieved his aim; Prussia became the second most powerful nation in Europe.

The problem is that the ego can easily overreach itself. Frederick William’s son, also called Frederick, was a lover of literature and music, and hated the army. His father treated him with unremitting hostility, and when his son tried to escape to England, had him thrown into prison and the officer who had tried to escape with him decapitated in front of his eyes. But when he became king of Prussia, Frederick II was old enough to feel nostalgic about his early training, and increased his army by ten thousand men. It seemed pointless to have such an army and not to use it; so Frederick picked a quarrel with the empress Maria Theresa of Austria – mother of Marie Antoinette – and invaded Silesia. With Austria finally beaten, Frederick decided to devote his life to art and philosophy, and built himself a palace called Sans Souci – Without a Care. There he wrote music, played the flute, and entertained scientists, poets and philosophers, including Voltaire. But a man who has annexed someone else’s country cannot expect to be left in peace. He was attacked simultaneously by Austria, Sweden, Russia and France. After more than twelve years of war he beat back his enemies and signed a peace treaty, but Prussia was in ruins, and Frederick an exhausted and disillusioned man. He devoted the remainder of his life to rebuilding his country and adding to it, until he had created the foundation of modern Germany. But it was a kind of modern counterpart of ancient Rome, a land without freedom, without democracy, without joy. And within two decades of Frederick’s death, the great Prussian state had collapsed, undermined by Napoleon. There was not enough vitality in it to hold it together. Hermann Pinnow writes in his History of Germany (Everyman edition, p. 271): ‘The work of the “crowned Friend of Man”, which had been conceived on such generous lines, was soon shattered through his complete neglect of the accomplished facts of history.’ Like Louis XIV, Frederick failed to grasp that, in the modern world, the rules of history have been changed.

The tragedy of Frederick the Great makes us aware that Rousseau and Paine, Shelley and Byron were oversimplifying when they denounced authority as the major curse of mankind. Frederick was not a tyrant; he was one of the most enlightened monarchs of his time. He began his reign by throwing open the state granaries to the poor, abolishing flogging and reducing the punishment for crimes. He was a sincere admirer of Voltaire and Rousseau. If a man as well-intentioned and as enlightened as Frederick could become a tyrant against his will, then there was clearly something wrong with the socialist belief that tyranny was the outcome of human wickedness and could be abolished by dethroning the tyrants and replacing them with idealists.

The history of Napoleon Bonaparte underlines the same point. Napoleon regarded himself as a successor of Frederick the Great; when he visited his tomb he told his officers: ‘Hats off, gentlemen – if he were still alive we should not be here.’ His rise to power is one of the most remarkable success stories in history. As a young officer he was sent to fight the Austrians in Italy; his purpose was only to harass them while the main French forces converged on Vienna. In fact, his victories were so brilliant that he was soon the hero of France. He next persuaded the government to let him take an army to Egypt, to cut off the British trade route to India, and again there was a series of astonishing victories before Nelson trapped the French in Egypt by destroying their fleet. Napoleon hurried back to France, took part in the overthrow of the government, and was elected first consul. He went on to end the civil war in France, win a victory against the Austrians, and bring Britain, Austria and Russia to the peace table. During the next two years, he showed himself to be an admirable peacetime ruler, establishing public schools, reducing unemployment, and establishing the Code Napoleon which gave all men equal rights under the law. Many believed him to be the saviour of Europe, and Beethoven dedicated his Eroica symphony to him. In 1804 he was crowned emperor in Notre Dame by the pope.