Scientific Solution of the Problem of Government

DEMONSTRATION. 1. The average voter is a moron. He believes what he reads in newspapers, feeds his imagination and lulls his repressions on the cinemas, and hopes to break away from his slavery by football pools, cross-word prizes, or spotting the winner of the 3.30. He is ignorant as no illiterate peasant is ignorant; he has no power of independent thought. He is the prey of panic. But he has the vote. 2. The men in power can only govern by stampeding him into wars, playing on his fears and prejudices until he acquiesces in repressive legislation against his obvious interests, playing on his vanity until he is totally blind to his own misery and serfdom. The alternative method is undisguised dragooning. In brief, we govern by a mixture of lying and bullying. 3. This desperate resort to archaic weapons is the heritage of hypocrisy. The theories of Divine Right, aristocratic superiority, the moral order of Nature, are all to-day exploded bluffs. Even those of us who believe in supernatural sanctions for our privileges to browbeat and rob the people no longer delude ourselves with the thought that our victims share our superstitions. 4. Even dictators understand this. Mussolini has tried to induce the ghost of Ancient Rome to strut the stage in the image of Julius Cæsar; Hitler has invented a farrago of nonsense about Nordics and Aryans; nobody even pretends to believe either, except through the “Will-to- believe.” And the presence is visibly breaking down everywhere. They cannot even be galvanised with spasm of pseudo- activity, as still occasionally happens with the dead toads of superstition. 5. There is only one hope of uniting the people under intelligent leadership; because there is only one thing in which every one really believes. That is, believes in