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Title: The Lesser Evil Author: Dominique Misein Language: en Topics: Democracy, Freedom, Italian, Italy Source: Retrieved on 1/30/21 from https://sites.google.com/site/anarchyinitaly/diavolo-in-corpo/the-lesser-evil
Several years ago during an election, a famous Italian journalist
invited his readers to hold their noses and fulfill their duty as
citizens by voting for the party then in power. The journalist was well
aware that to the people this party sent forth the stench of decades of
institutional rot—abuse of power, corruption, dirty dealings—but the
only political alternative on the market, the left, seemed even more
ominous. There was no choice but to hold one’s nose and vote for the
rulers already in power.
At the time, though it was the subject of much debate, this invitation
had some success and can be said, in a sense, to have won the day. This
is not surprising. Basically, the journalist’s argument used one of the
most easily verified conditioned social reflexes, that of the politics
of the lesser evil that guides the daily choices of the majority of
people. Faced with the affairs of life, good common sense is always
quick to remind us that between equally detestable alternatives the best
we can do is choose the one that seems to us to be the least likely to
bring unpleasant consequences.
How can we deny that our entire life has been reduced to one long and
exhausting search for the lesser evil? How can we deny that that concept
of choosing the good—understood not in the absolute sense, but most
simply as what is esteemed as such—is generally rejected a priori? All
of our experience and that of past generations teach us that the art of
living is the hardest and that the most ardent dreams can only have a
tragic conclusion: victims of the alarm clock, of the closing titles of
a film, of the last page of a book. “It has always been this way”—we are
told with a sigh, and from that we conclude that it will always be this
way.
Clearly, all this does not keep us from understanding how harmful
everything we have to face is. But we know how to choose an evil. What
we lack—and we lack it because it has been taken from us—is not the
capacity to judge the world around us, the horror of which imposes
itself with the immediacy of a punch in the face, so much as the ability
to go beyond the given possibilities—or even merely attempt to do so.
Thus, accepting the eternal excuse that one runs the risk of losing
everything if one is not satisfied with what on already has here, one
winds up going through one’s existence under the flag of renunciation.
Our own daily lives with their indiscretions offer us numerous examples
of this. In all sincerity, how many of us can boast of reveling in life,
of being satisfied by it? And how many can say that they are satisfied
by their work, by these hours without purpose, without pleasure, without
end? And yet, faced with the bugaboo of unemployment, we are quick to
accept waged misery in order to avoid misery without wages. How do we
explain the tendency of so many to prolong their years of study for as
long as possible—a characteristic that is quite widespread—if not in
terms of the refusal to enter into an adult world in which one can see
the end of an already precarious freedom? And what can we say then of
love, that spasmodic search for somebody to love and by whom to be loved
that usually ends up as its parody, since merely in order to remove the
specter of loneliness we prefer to prolong emotional relationships that
are already worn out? Stingy with amazement and enchantment, our days on
earth are only able to grant us the boredom of serial repetition.
So in spite of the numerous attempts to hide or minimize the injuries
brought about by the current social system, we see them all. We know all
about living in a world that damages us. But to render it bearable,
which is to say acceptable, it is enough to objectify it, to furnish it
with a historical justification, to endow it with an implacable logic
before which our bookkeepers’ consciousness can only capitulate. To
render the absence of life and its ignoble barter with survival—the
boredom of years passed in obligation, the forced renunciation of love
and passion, the premature aging of the senses, the blackmail of work,
environmental devastation and the various forms of self-humiliation—more
bearable, what is better than to relativize this situation, to compare
it to others of greater anguish and oppression; what is more effective
than to compare it with the worst?
Naturally, it would be a mistake to believe that the logic of the lesser
evil is limited to merely regulating our household chores. Above all it
regulates and administers the whole of social life as that journalist
knew well. In fact, every society known to the human race is considered
imperfect. Regardless of their ideas, everyone has dreamed of living in
a world different from the present one: a more representative democracy,
an economy more free from state intervention, a “federalist” rather than
a centralized power, a nation without foreigners and so on even to the
most extreme aspirations.
But the desire to realize one’s dreams goads one to action, because only
action resolves to transform the world, rendering it similar to the
dream. Action resounds in the ear like the din of the trumpets of
Jericho. No imperative exists that possesses a ruder efficacy, and for
anyone who hears it the need to go into action imposes itself without
delay and without conditions. But anyone who calls for action to realize
the aspirations that enliven her quickly receives strange and unexpected
replies. The neophyte learns in a hurry that an effective action is one
that limits itself to realizing circumscribed, gloomy and sad dreams.
Not only are the great utopias apparently beyond reach, but even much
more modest objectives prove to be barely realizable. Thus anyone who
considered transforming the world according to his dream finds herself
unable to do anything but transform the dream, adapting it to the more
immediate reality of this world. With the aim of acting productively,
one finds oneself constrained to repress their dream. Thus, the first
renunciation that productive action demands of anyone who wants to act
is that she reduce his dream to the proportions recommended by what
exists. In this way, she comes to an understanding, in a few words, that
ours is an epoch of compromise, of half measures, of plugged noses.
Precisely, of lesser evils.
If one considers it carefully, it makes sense that the concept of
reformism, a cause to which all are devoted today*, represents an
accomplished expression of the politics of the lesser evil: a prudent
act subject to the watchful eye of moderation which never loses sight of
its signs of acceptance and which proceeds with caution worthy of the
most consummate diplomacy. The preoccupation with avoiding jolts is such
that when some adverse circumstance renders them inevitable, one hurries
there to legitimate it, showing how a worse calamity was avoided. Didn’t
we just go through a war last summer that was justified as the lesser
evil in respect to a savage “ethnic cleansing”, just as fifty years ago
the use of atom bombs on Hiroshima an Nagasaki was justified as a lesser
evil in respect to the continuation of the world war? And this in spite
of the claim of every government on the planet to abhor the recourse to
force in the resolution of conflicts.
Indeed. Even the ruling class recognizes the basis of the critiques
formulated with regards to the present social order for which it is
otherwise responsible. Sometimes one may even find several of its
spokespeople in the frontline in formally denouncing the discriminations
of the laws of the market, the totalitarianism of “single thought”, the
abuses of liberalism. Even for this reality this is all an evil. But it
is an inevitable evil, and the most one can do is to try to diminish its
effects.
The evil in question, from which we cannot be freed—as should be
clear—is a social order based on profit, on money, on merchandise, on
the reduction of the human being to a thing, on power—and that has in
the state an indispensable tool of coercion. It is only after having put
the existence of capitalism, with all of its corollaries, beyond debate
that the political attaches can ask themselves which capitalistic form
can represent the lesser evil to support. Nowadays, the preference is
granted to democracy, which is presented—not inadvertently—as the “least
bad of known political systems.” When compared with fascism and
stalinism, it easily gets the support of western common sense, more so
since the democratic lie is based on the (illusory) participation of its
subjects in the management of the public thing that, therefore, comes to
seem perfectible. Thus people are easily convinced that “more just”
state activity, a “better distribution of the wealth”, or rather a “more
prudent exploitation of resources” constitute the only possibilities at
their disposal for confronting the problems of modern civilization.
But in accepting this, a basic detail is omitted. What is omitted is an
understanding of what essentially unites the different alternatives
advanced: the existence of money, of commodity exchange, of classes, of
power. Here one could say it is forgotten that to choose an evil—even if
it is a lesser evil—is the best way to prolong it. To use the examples
above once more—one “more just” state decides to bomb an entire country
to convince a “more evil” state to stop the ethnic cleansing operations
within its own borders. There’s no use in denying that the difference
exists, but we perceive it only in the repugnance that, in this
situation, inspires a state logic capable of playing with the lives of
thousands of people who are slaughtered and bombed. Similarly, a “better
distribution of wealth” tries to avoid concentrating the fruits of the
labor of the customary many into the hands of the customary few. But
what does that mean? Briefly, the knife with which the masters of the
earth slice the pie of the world’s wealth would change and maybe they
would add another place to the table of merry guests. The rest of
humanity would have to continue to be content with crumbs. Finally, who
would dare to deny that the exploitation of nature has caused countless
environmental catastrophes. But it isn’t necessary to be experts in the
matter to understand that making this exploitation “more prudent” will
not serve to impede further catastrophes, but solely to render them
“more prudent” as well. But does a “prudent” environmental catastrophe
exist? And within what parameters can it be measured?
A small war is better than a big war; being a billionaire is better than
being a millionaire; circumscribed catastrophes are better than extended
catastrophes. How can we not see that along this road the social,
political and economic conditions that render the outbreak of war, the
accumulation of privilege and the continuing occurrence of catastrophes
possible will continue to perpetuate themselves? How can we not see that
such politics does not even offer a minimal practical utility, that when
the bucket is full to the brim a drop suffices to make it overflow? From
the moment we renounce questioning capitalism as a totality common to
all the varieties of political regulation, giving preference instead to
the mere comparison between various techniques of exploitation, the
persistence of “evil” is guaranteed… Rather than asking oneself whether
one wants to have a master to obey, one prefers to choose the master who
beats one the least. In this way, every outburst, every tension, every
desire fore freedom is reduced to a tamer decision; instead of attacking
the evils that poison us , we blame them on the excesses of the system.
Within this context, the greater the virulence with which these excesses
are denounced, the more the social system that produces them is
consolidated. The plague once more closes in on this ideological
whitewash, without leaving a way of escape. And as long as the question
to resolve is that of how to manage domination rather than considering
the possibility of getting rid of it and figuring out how to do so, the
logic of those who govern and manage us will continue to dictate the
measures to take with regard to everything.
After the injury, the mockery cannot be lacking. At every turn of the
screw, we are assured that the result obtained cannot be worse than that
which came before, that the persecuted politics—always aimed toward
progress—will block the path of more conservative politics, that after
having suffered so much difficulty in silence we are now on the right
road at last. From lesser evil to lesser evil, the countless reformists
who overrun this society drive us from war to war, from catastrophe to
catastrophe, from sacrifice to sacrifice. And because one accepts this
mortifying logic of petty (change) accounting and of submission to the
state, by dint of making calculations to weigh between evil and evil, a
day could come when one places one’s very own life on the scale: better
to croak right now than to continue to languish on this earth. It must
be this thought that puts the weapon in the hand of the suicide. Because
one plugs one’s nose in order to vote for the benefit of power, one ends
up no longer breathing.
As we have seen, remaining within the context of the lesser evil does
not raise too many difficulties; the difficulty begins at the moment one
leaves this context, at the moment one destroys it. All one has to do is
affirm that between two evils the worst thing one could do is to choose
either one of them, and there it is: the knock of the police at the
door. When one is the enemy of every party, every war, every capitalist,
all exploitation of nature, one can only appear suspicious in the eyes
of the authorities. In fact it is here that subversion begins. Refusing
the politics of the lesser evil, refusing this socially instilled habit
that induces one to preserve one’s existence rather than living it,
necessarily leads one to put everything that the real world and its
“necessity” drains of meaning into play. Not that Utopia is immune to
the logic of the lesser evil—that is not guaranteed. During
revolutionary periods, it has been precisely this logic that has stopped
the assaults of the insurgents: when the tempest rages and the billows
threaten to sweep everything away there is always some more realistic
revolutionary who rushes to detour popular rage toward more “reasonable”
demands. After all even someone who wants to turn the world upside down
fears losing all. Even when from that all, there is really nothing that
belongs to him.
were intended in the Italian.—translator