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