The World State [A True Story] | New Class
by Martin Durkin
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| 0:00 | In recent films, I've started to build an argument that socialism is not about fighting for the interests of the workers. On the contrary, socialism is a form of organized gangsterism, a form of parasitism which benefits a large class of university educated tax spongers in our oversized public and third sectors. A class of people I've called the new class or blob. The class that forms our ruling establishment. |
| 0:28 | Critics of socialism argue till they're blue in the face that socialism doesn't work. Eye-watering levels of taxation, money printing, and profligate government spending does not cure poverty. It cripples economic growth and creates poverty. It's important to understand that socialists don't care. |
| 0:46 | The state is not there to fight poverty and inequality and stimulate growth. The state is there to support and empower the people who run the state. It exists to confer on them money and guardianship over the rest of us to make them the ruling class. We must stop thinking of government as a thing, of the state as a thing. It is a class of people driven by their own interests. A class of people who are paid for out of taxation and whose jobs and power are defined by the perceived need for government to look after us and regulate us. That is how they see the world. This is a class that presents itself as rational and wise and benevolent. But the new class is deeply intolerant, driven by fanatical passions. Its blind self-righteousness, its hunger for power, its hatred of its opponents. This, as we shall see, is a class whose quite deranged love of state power has given us fascism and communism. This is a class of effete, snobbish intellectuals who regard the demos as something alien to be controlled. Democracy for this class is something which they must pay lip service but which must be limited and subverted. The illusion of democracy must be maintained but the content emptied out. Our choice must be the uni- party. In so far as local national populations still have a meaningful say in their choice of government. The aim is to override even this to transcend national government completely to go over the heads of the people. This together with the new class's limitless ambition for power drives its yearning for ever more powerful transnational institutions, world government. But these are all sweeping statements. They need to be unpacked. They must be supported with evidence. So let's look at some history. Let's zoom back in time to the first world war or the aftermath, which is when the new class in its latest iteration took shape. Let's look at the social milieu from which the new class, the blob, evolved. I'm talking about that class of Europeans called the intelligentsia. |
| 2:55 | I looked at this lot in my last film which explored why the intelligentsia so hates capitalism. In this film, I'm looking at why the intelligentsia so loves the state. The first thing to say is that from early on, intellectuals have seen the state as something which is meant to support them. In the 1920s and '30s, the most famous intellectual circle in Britain and possibly worldwide was the Bloomsbury group. And the nearest the Bloomsbury group came to a manifesto was Clive Bell's Civilization published in 1938. |
| 3:28 | In it, he says this very candidly. He highlights the plight of the unmarketable, impunious, workshy intellectual. Unluckily, material security, leisure, liberty, all cost money. And ultimately in a market economy, money is to be obtained only by productive labor. God forbid work for a living. For Bell, getting a proper job was too hideous to contemplate since almost all kinds of money-making are detrimental to the subtler and more intense states of mind. Intellectuals like himself should have their minds on higher things. There are personal relations to be enjoyed, beauty to be contemplated or created, truth to be sought. Society for its own good, said Bell had to be reorganized to support folk like himself, the intellectual elite. The men and women who are to compose that nucleus from which radiates civilization must have security, leisure, economic freedom, and liberty to think, feel, and experiment. If the community wants civilization, it must pay for it. His friend Huxley agreed that society had a duty to support an idle class of intellectuals. You must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of honest work. In practical terms, this meant public funding for colleges and universities and research institutes and opera companies and libraries, the tax-funded arts, science and educational establishment. But there was something else. It is clear from the writings of intellectuals from the mid-19th century to the first decades of the 20th that there was another reason to embrace state power to the great distress of the old intellectual gentry. Capitalism wasn't just making the lower orders richer. The masses were also losing their sense of social inferiority. As we've seen through their sheer weight in the marketplace, the masses were bending culture to reflect their tastes. |
| 5:27 | Newspapers were pandering to them. They were expressing opinions. They were expecting to have their say in how they were governed and who should govern them. For nature, the advent of capitalism involved the great evil protracted slow rebellion of the mob and the slaves. Capitalist social mobility and the shift in political power that resulted led to the dominion of inferior men. Capitalism had dethroned the natural rulers and even the idea of ruling, or rather what they now call ruling, bartering and haggling for power with the rabble. He complained that everywhere the mediocre are combining in order to make themselves master. |
| 6:06 | Democracy was the tyranny of the least and dumbest. In his "Revolt of the masses", José Ortega y Gasset was alarmed that the ordinary man, hither too guided by others, has resolved to govern the world himself. He was distressed that mass man ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence. This was an historic transformation. I doubt whether there have been other periods in history in which the multitude has come to govern more directly than our own. This was a deplorable development. The masses by definition neither should nor can direct their own personal existence and still less rule society in general. The masses were beastly ignorant, said Ortega. The average man finds himself with ideas in his head, but his ideas are in effect nothing more than appetites in words. |
| 6:56 | Capitalism represented the brutal empire of the masses. Intellectuals like Ortega or capitalism as a form of barbarism, the collapse of civilized society, a drift towards disturbing anarchy ordered by nothing other than crass economic forces and the wants and desires of the many headed. Instead, a truly civilized society should be planned and ordered from above rationally by intelligent folk like himself. For snobs like Ortega, the First World War was in gift. |
| 7:24 | In the various belligerent countries, the state extended its power to a degree unprecedented in all history. As we've seen during the Great War, even the most hitherto free market countries adopted a command economy with governments assuming control of what was to be grown and manufactured, by whom, in what quantities, for what prices, and what might be sold and consumed, where and by whom. As A.J. Taylor observed, the state established a hold over its citizens, which although relaxed in peace time, was never to be removed, and which the Second World War was again to increase. |
| 7:58 | This enormous unprecedented expansion of the state sent a fisson of excitement through the intelligentsia. With total war came total planning and suddenly a new model for society presented itself. |
| 8:11 | The bloated administrative state would not only provide the intellectual class with an income. It would establish the intellectual in the gratifying role of expert, supervisor, overseer, regulator, and planner directing the rest of us from on high. a versed all powerful state controlled by a class of wise educated administrators. It was utterly thrilling and the intellectuals set to work articulating how this would work and how great it was going to be. HG Wells was one of the leading proponents of this new view. Wells wrote an incredibly influential series of books, anticipations, the open conspiracy, modern utopia, the shape of things to come, the science of life, and others in which he outlined a new kind of modern society planned and governed by an elite class of experts. Wells dedicated his shape of things to come to Ortega, whose revolt of the masses had been published in English the previous year. He shared Ortega's utter contempt for the masses. |
| 9:08 | Wells, who described himself as a socialist, considered the great mass of ordinary people to be a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven, helpless, useless, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying by sheer incontinents and stupidity. They were a leaderless, aimless multitude, a bulky, immovable excretion, nothing more than stagnant ponds of population. The new society imagined by Wells would abolish individual ownership and private profit seeking. But this was not in order to liberate the workers. On the contrary, the purpose was to contain them. He and his fellow conspirators, he said, had lost the delusive comfort of belief in that magic giant, the proletariat. The direction of society, he said, could not possibly be left in the hands of thugs, racehorse book makers, willful idlers, burglars, and the like. Such creatures were weedy, tragic, pathetic, cruel, and sheerely horrible. They were a drifting, so suspicious multitude. This view of the lower orders, by the way, was common to Bloomsbury intellectuals and his fellow socialists. Will's friend Virginia Wolf called the lower classes averse, featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff, occasionally wobbling this way or that as some instinct of hate, revenge, or admiration bubbles up beneath it. To the socialist J.B. Priestley, they were mostly small, rather misshaped, toothless men and women, harmless enough, but very unattractive in the mass. To the socialist and eugenicist George Bernard Shaw, they were the promiscuously bred masses. To John Maynard Keynes, they were the brutish proletariat. Instead of democratic rule by the lower orders, Wells called for government by an aristocracy of experts who would control the dull base masses below to save them from their present confusion of aimless and ill-directed lives. The new ruling class would comprise a new numerous intelligent, educated, and capable social element conscious of itself and its distinctive aims. A class of state funded intellectuals, scientifically trained administrators, an elite of intelligent, creative-minded people. |
| 11:16 | This intellectual new class of guardians were to Wells the reasoning soul in the body of the race. Instead of mass democracy ruled by the new stupid, Aldous Huxley said an ideal state would be controlled by an aristocracy of the intellect. America's failing was its lack of an intellectual aristocracy. |
| 11:35 | Huxley even proposed the special breeding and training of a small cast of experts without whom a scientific civilization cannot exist. These experts would be responsible for the deliberate planning of our social life in all its aspects. Such views, by the way, were standard among the intellectuals of the age. In 1932, for example, Freud insisted that the mob eager for enjoyment and destruction has to be held down forcibly by a prudent superior class. For Wells, democracy had to be suspended because central planning and control by the new class demands a more powerful and efficient method of control than electoral methods can give. Huxley agreed that the rule of an intellectual class might mean embracing some form of totalitarianism. We must abandon democracy and allow ourselves to be ruled dictatorially by men who will compel us to do and suffer what irrational foresight demands. |
| 12:30 | He said dictatorship and scientific propaganda may be the only way of saving humanity. For Clive Bell, such a tyranny of the intelligentsia was called for because there has never been a civilized democracy. Many great intellectuals of the time, Minten Shaw, Kipling, Belloc, T.S. Eliot spoke out against democracy. |
| 12:48 | But abolishing democracy is a tough cell to the electorate. So these intellectuals came up with a much better idea. keep the form of democracy, elections and such, but drain it of any real substance. Under the subtle guidance of the new class, said Huxley, democracy would become an empty ritual. |
| 13:06 | The sovereign people will go to the polling booths firmly believing itself to be exercising free and rational choice, but in fact absolutely predestined by a lifelong course of propaganda. This lifelong indoctrination of the population would be achieved by the domination by the state controlled elite of all education and media. In the case of Britain, by the state monopoly control of education and the BBC's monopoly control of broadcasting. As Huxley says of the ordinary citizen, by the time he reaches what is sometimes ironically called the age of reason, he will be wholly unable to think for himself. None but the approved state ideas will ever even occur to him. Keynes called this the nationalizing of knowledge. The new class of course controls public administration and the judiciary as well as our education system. They are the ones who frame and write legislation. Pity the politician or party who goes against them. Here we have the historical origins of today's uni party. But Wells and his friends came up with another ruse for subverting democracy. There was a danger that sovereign governments might still to some extent remain answerable to their voters. How much better if these governments could be overridden by a power mightier still run by Wells and his friends. Wells talks of the necessity of disavowing the sovereignty of contemporary governments of setting up authoritative central controls to supplement or supersede them. He said this great confusion that is democracy must pass away inevitably by its own inherent contradictions into the higher organism the world state of the coming years. For James Bham, if political problems were settled by scientific reasoning, we should most probably expect the political system of managerial society would take the form of a single world state. The world state, said Wells, would bring order to the anarchy of national sovereignty. It would comprise a series of world bureaus which would take into account all of the resources of the planet, estimate current needs, aortion productive activities, and control distribution. |
| 15:09 | The intelligent minority who ran the great central organization would tell people what had best be done here, there, and everywhere. Solve general tangles, examine, approve, and initiate fresh methods. And all of this meant the control of people. The organized world community conducting and ensuring its own progress requires a deliberate collective control of population as a primary condition. This would include limits on the general right of free movement. To facilitate this, every citizen would be forced to carry an unfalsifiable identity card, the details of which would be on a world government database with their activities monitored by the central observation bureau. Other bureaus would include educational control, which would draw together police, hygiene, schooling, and literature into one powerful nexus of control, and the education faculty of the control of health and behavior. The considerable powers of the world state would enable it to thrust its inquiring and compelling fingers more and more intimately into the recesses of human life. Our understanding of reality would be guided by the world state which would tell us what was true and false through the world encyclopedia establishment. |
| 16:20 | These views could easily be imposed since the world council would have the supreme advantage of holding all communications in its hands. |
| 16:29 | The job of the department of general psychology would be to study and guide how we think. But more than this, Wells dreamed of establishing a single state approved world religion. The modernization of the religious impulse which would imbue in people the desire for service for subordination to the coming single world state. This would facilitate what Wells called a ruthless mental disinfection of the world. You may call it a tyranny, said Wells of his grand vision, but in fact it represents a release from our base passions. |
| 17:03 | Tyranny is in essence liberation. He says his world government, he says, will not suppress men but obsessions. The reward for handing over our freedom to the world state would be freedom from a thousand fears. |
| 17:17 | George Orwell's two great novels, Animal Farm and 1984 was a direct response to the work of Wells and his fellow socialist intellectuals. Orwell tells us the truth is that to many people calling themselves socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves. |
| 17:35 | It means a set of reforms which we, the clever ones, are going to impose on them, the lower orders. |
| 17:42 | In Animal Farm, the ruling intellectual class were the evil pigs. The work of teaching and organizing the others fell naturally upon the pigs, who were generally recognized as being the cleverest of the animals. The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others. With their superior knowledge, it was natural that they should assume leadership. In his novel 1984, Orwell tells us who it was that created the terrifying society he depicts and formed the new ruling class. |
| 18:12 | It was the bureaucrats, scientists, teachers, sociologists, journalists, and others. In a word, the very people Wells imagined as the ruling cast, the intelligentsia, the new class. Wells was not a marginal figure. Quite the opposite. He was a personal friend of Winston Churchill. He used to lunch privately with Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he visited in 1933 and 1935 and 1937. He met with Roosevelt's cabinet to discuss the New Deal. Wells was given a gushing welcome by the Soviet Union which he visited three times at the personal invitation of Stalin and where he met both Lenin and Stalin for whom he expressed great admiration. H.G. Wells's friends included John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, Sydney and Beatatric Webb, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, Aldous Huxley, Bernard Russell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Fster, Sinclair Lewis, JM Barry, JB Priestley, Ezra Pound, John Strait, Leonard and Virginia Wolf. In fact, the entire Bloomsbury group. He had a long-running affair with Rebecca West. He was friends with Hollywood stars like Charles Lorton and Elsa Lanchester, some of whom starred in his films. His science fiction work, which is infused with his political ideas, made him famous. The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds. Orson Wells turned his novels into radio plays. Sam Goldwin offered him a five-year contract. His political manifesto, The Shape of Things to Come, was made into a major movie starring Ralph Richardson, Raymond Massie, and others, and would long to be found on lists of the best films of all time. The BBC regularly invited him to give talks on topics like, "What would I do with the world and effectively turned him into radio star?" Wells was not a marginal figure. In 1928, he drew up a highly influential manifesto for the emerging new class intelligentsia called Open Conspiracy. The open conspiracy he called for was among his fellow intellectuals and was absolutely explicit that its ultimate aim is the establishment of a scientifically planned world government. The book was a huge hit and was reprinted three times with excerpts published in the times. |
| 20:14 | Bertr and Russell read it with complete sympathy. Beatrice Webb called it inspiring. Several organizations around the world were established to further the ends of the conspiracy by the likes of Sylvia Pankhurst and others. and it formed the manifesto for the Progressive League, an organization which boasted as vice presidents H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Lyndon Wolf, Rebecca West, Harold Nicholson and others. As Wells and the Bloomsbury group were promoting their progressive league, Wells friend John Maynard Keynes, who was an enthusiastic supporter, was writing his general theory, which turned Wells's vision of a planned society into economic theory. Meanwhile, in the US, Roosevelt's brain trust of intellectuals, an idea of Wells, were overseeing a huge expansion of state control, sold to Americans as the New Deal. It wasn't that Wells was driving all this. It was rather that Wells was singularly brilliant at distilling the prejudices of his fellow intellectuals and turning them into a vision of a future society, a society where they were in charge. Wells was so successful because he caught the intellectual zeitgeist. Historians have a bad habit of putting things in different boxes. |
| 21:22 | The New Deal over here, fascism over there, communism somewhere else. But it's no accident that these phenomena were contemporaneous. They were different eddies in the same great wave of statism that washed over the industrial world after the first world war. Many intellectuals supported communism, but history has politely overlooked how many also admired the fascists. Rexford Tugwell, one of the main architects of the New Deal, was an admirer of Italian fascism and the Soviet Union. Roosevelt called Mussolini admirable and said he was deeply impressed by what he has accomplished. |
| 21:55 | Many intellectuals like Hyde openly supported the Nazis. In 1931, the writer Wyndham Lewis, whom TS Elliot lorded as the greatest prose-master of style in my generation, wrote his book Hitler in praise of the Führer. It must be remembered that fascists regarded themselves and were regarded as socialists, a fact that modern socialists seem to have forgotten. |
| 22:17 | Oswald Mosley, the leader of British fascism, had been a socialist labor MP and served in a labor government. In his fascist days, he knew and received advice from Keynes, who was himself an admirer of Nazi Germany. Mosley's early program was also greatly admired by Wells, who also knew him. Wells and Keynes and their fellow socialists, fascist and communist, were almost all deeply anti-Semitic. |
| 22:43 | When the Nazis proved less than popular, Wells tried to distance himself from them, but really it won't do. In 1938, Wells published with Julian Huxley, Eldest Huxley's elder brother, a book called The Science of Life, in which he expressed his enthusiastic support for eugenics when, and this was public knowledge, the Nazis in Germany had for some time been sterilizing undesirables and killing mentally handicapped people. |
| 23:08 | Wells and his friends were well up for this. In his book, A Modern Utopia, he asks, "... what should a society do with its congenital invalids, its idiots and madmen, its drunkards and men of vicious mind, its stupid people, too stupid to be of use to the community, is lumpish, unteable, and unimaginative people?" His terrifying answer is, "The species must be engaged in eliminating them. There is no escape from that. And conversely, the people of exceptional quality must be ascendant. The better sort of people, so far as they can be distinguished, must have the fullest freedom of public service and the fullest opportunity of parentage. His ideal state would achieve the maximum elimination of its feeble and spiritless folk of every generation. |
| 23:54 | He did not merely envisage preventing base types from procreating. He also imagined the state systematically exterminating them. Death would mean the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things. The ruling elite would have a stomach for such eugenic slaughter because they will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while. But this holocaust of the inadequate, he says, would be carried out with a minimum of suffering. In a foretaste of the Holocaust, his fellow eugenicist D.H. Lawrence imagined using poisoned gas. I would build a lethal chamber as big as Crystal Palace. Then I'd go into the back streets and the main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed. I would lead them gently and they would smile at me a weary thanks. It's worth remembering that not just Wells and Lawrence but George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, Aldous Huxley, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, William Beverage and others were all advocates of eugenics. |
| 24:49 | It's not just eugenics. Almost all of the utopian vision of Wells and his friends can be found expressed clearly and unashamedly in Hitler's Mein Kampf. |
| 24:57 | Hitler called for a worldview which repudiates the democratic principle of the rule of the masses and aims at giving the world to the best people. |
| 25:06 | Hitler's aim was to place men of brains above the multitude and make the latter obey the former. Like Wells, Huxley, and the rest, Hitler argued that the common interest is surely not served by allowing the multitude to rule, for they are not capable of thinking, nor are they efficient, and in no case whatsoever can they be said to be gifted. The best constitution, the best form of government is that which makes it quite natural for the best brains to reach a position of dominant importance and influence in the community. As George Orwell observed, much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the state encouragement of science, all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Hitler's views were not some weird aberration. They were commonly held among large swathes of Europe's intellectual class. As Professor Kerry rightly observes, the tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not in many respects a deviant work, but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy. And the tragedy for us is that these ideas are far from dead. My name is Martin Durkin, and this is Guerilla Science. |
