All human behavior is driven by desire. And then some zealous moralists have the whimsical notion that by relying on duty and moral principles, they can counteract desire. I call it whimsical not because no one has ever behaved responsibly, but because the word responsibility would mean nothing to a person if it were not for their desire to behave responsibly. If you want to know what a person will do, you need to have a general idea not only of the material circumstances in which he finds himself, but also of his whole range of desires and ideas, and their contrasting strengths and weaknesses.
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Desires that are politically influential can be divided into two levels. The first level comes from the basic needs of life, including food, shelter, and clothing. When these things become scarce, people will go to great lengths to obtain them in order to survive, even to the point of resorting to violence. Scholars of early human history have shown that during four different periods of drought years, there was a mass exodus of people from the Arabian Peninsula, with far-reaching political, cultural, and religious consequences for the surrounding region. The last of these four migration events produced the rise of Islam. The gradual spread of Germanic tribes from the south of Russia to England and finally to San Francisco was motivated by the same thing. There is no need to doubt that the human need for food has been, and still is, a major cause of major political events.
But one very important detail that distinguishes man from other animals is that he has desires. The kind of desire that can be called private, capable of never being satisfied, even so that even in heaven he will still never stop. A python goes to sleep when it is full and does not wake up again until it needs its next meal. This is not the case with the vast majority of human beings, on the other hand. The Arabs, who used to live frugally in the past, settled in almost unbelievably lavish palaces after some periods of great wealth from the Western Roman Empire, did not become lazy as a result. Hunger ceased to be a motivation, and at the slightest nod of the head Greek slaves were offered extremely fine food. But other desires kept them motivated, especially the four that can be labeled: possession, competition, vanity, and the love of power.
Possessiveness - the desire to possess as much property as possible as well as the sign of having possessions - is motivated, I think, by a mixture of fear and a desire for necessities. I once entertained as friends two little girls from Estonia who had managed to escape from the Great Famine. They lived in my house and naturally had no worries about food or drink. But as soon as they could, they slipped away to a neighboring farm to steal potatoes for storage. Rockefeller had a very poor childhood experience, so he remained frugal as an adult. In the same way, Arab sheikhs, in their soft, smooth Byzantine boardrooms, still can't forget the desert and still store up riches that are practically impossible to spend. But no kind of psychological analysis of possessiveness can fail to recognize what has been described in the preceding paragraph as one of the very great motives, especially in the case of those who possess great power. For, as was said before, it is one of the infinite human motives. Though you can have much already, you will always want more. Contentment is an impossible dream.
But possessiveness, while a major engine under the capitalist system, is not meant to be the greatest motivation out of overcoming hunger. The motivation to compete with each other goes far beyond that. Muslim history has shown time and again that the destruction of dynasties was often due to the inability of princes of different origins to unite their views and the eventual civil wars that created a situation of widespread destruction. This same thing happened in modern Europe when the British government foolishly allowed the German Kaiser to attend naval maneuvers at Spithead, and what went through the Kaiser's mind was not, as we might expect, but rather: I must have a navy as good as the one my grandmother had. The maritime platform would have been better if possessiveness had always been stronger than competitiveness. But the fact is that a very large number of people would be happy to face poverty as long as they could firmly and completely destroy their competitors. That's how tax tiers are born.
Vanity is a powerful motivator, and anyone who has had much experience with children knows how persistent they are in their goofing off and saying "look at me". "Look at me" is one of the most basic needs of the human heart. In Renaissance Italy, there is an incident that can be mentioned again and again: when the young prince was confronted by the priest on his deathbed and asked if he had anything to confess, he said, "Yes, there was a crucial moment in my life when I was visiting both the Emperor and the Pope, and I was too enamored with the summit of my own life to see beyond it. I overlooked the opportunity to throw them both down at the same time, and I could have been immortalized. The history books don't record whether or not the priest forgave him. One of the troubles with vanity is that it is ever more inflated. It was originally said that the murderer who was allowed to look over the proceedings of his own trial in the newspapers would be furious if he found that a particular paper did not report it in sufficient detail, and if he found that other papers about himself reported a great deal, he would be even more furious with the papers that reported very little about him. The same is true of politicians and men of letters, and the more prestigious the clipping office finds them, the harder it will be to satisfy them. It is impossible to exaggerate the influence of human vanity throughout all corners of life, from the child of three years old to the monarch whose frown vibrates the world. Humans have even been guilty of such great irreverence: feeling that their conceived deities have the same need and crave constant praise.
There is another motive that is just as influential as the above, and far beyond them. I am referring to the fascination with power. The fascination with power is somewhat similar to vanity, but they are definitely not the same thing. Vanity requires praise, and it's easy to get praise without power. In the United States, the people who get the most praise are the movie stars, but they can easily be beaten back by the members of the "Anti-American Campaign Review Committee," and they don't enjoy the praise anyway. In Britain, the King gets more praise than the Prime Minister, but the Prime Minister has more power. Many people are more enthusiastic about praise than power, but those people are less influential in many things than those enamored of power. In 1814, Brooke (the Prussian marshal who defeated Napoleon, paraphrasing), after visiting Napoleon's palace, exclaimed that he was a complete fool to attack Moscow when he had all this. For Napoleon, he certainly wasn't without vanity, it's just that when he had to make a choice, he aspired to power. And for Brooke, Napoleon's choice was undoubtedly foolish. Power, like vanity, is never satisfied. Only omnipotence can satisfy it completely. Particularly as is the weakness of those who are energetic, the occasional positive effect of the fascination with power is totally mismatched with the frequency with which it occurs. In fact it is the strongest motive of those great men.
The fascination with power grows with every day's experience of it, and whether that power is as great as a king's or as small as an insignificant one. In the happy days before 1914, women who treated themselves well had access to many servants, and the pleasure they derived from having power over the household grew steadily with age. Similarly in any dictatorship, the holders of power become more and more tyrannical because of the pleasurable experiences they get from power. Because power makes humans do things they'd rather not do, men agitated by their love of power are more inclined to make others miserable than to allow them to be happy. If you tell your boss you're going to miss this meeting for some sensible reason, his love of power will be more satisfied by denying you than by agreeing to you. If you ask for a building permit, the little official in question will obviously get more pleasure from saying "no" than "yes". It's a series of things that make being in love with power a dangerous motivation.
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Now for some other motives. The first of these is the love of excitement. The superiority of humans over animals lies in the degree to which they tolerate boredom. Though I have also thought many times that observing apes in zoos one can learn that they also have these emotional germs of not being willing to be bored. Escape from boredom is a highly influential desire that almost all humans **** have. When white men first came into contact with savage, primitive tribes, they gave those people pretty much everything from gospels to pumpkin pie. Nevertheless, we may still regret it, because most savages received those things very coldly. Among those gifts, what they really valued was intoxicating liquors, those that could give them, for the first time in their lives, the illusion, even if briefly, that it was better to be alive than to be dead. When the Indians remain in their still uncivilized state, they smoke their own little pipes, not calmly, as we do, but in great orgies, and in the excesses of excitement fall into a stupor, and when the nicotine fails to excite them, a "patriotic" orator encourages them to attack the neighboring tribes, which would give them the same pleasure as we (according to our temperament) have given them, and which they have not yet received. that would give them the kind of enjoyment that we (according to our temperament) get in ordinary horse-racing. With civilized groups of people, as with the early Indian tribes, I think it was mainly out of a love of the excitement that can make civilians applaud when war suddenly breaks out; a passion very much like that of a soccer game, though its results are sometimes slightly more severe.
What exactly is the root cause of mankind's love of excitement is difficult to be entirely sure of. I tend to think it's because of our spiritual nature in order to adapt to that phase of our lives when it was mostly men hunting for a living. When a man, armed with primitive and backward weapons, and with the expectation of supper, has been busy all day in order to round up a deer, and when, at sunset, he returns triumphantly to his cave, dragging his quarry with him, and lays down contentedly with his fatigue, and meanwhile his wife begins to organize and cook the food, and he is physically sleepy and his bones ache, and the aroma of cooking fills all the places of which he can be aware, and at last, having eaten his supper, he went into a deep sleep. In such a life he has neither time nor energy to grow weary. But when he enters the period of farming, and leaves his wife to do all the heavy work in the fields, he has time to think of the vanities of human life, to invent myths and philosophical systems, and to dream of the life which he will henceforth lead for ever in the pantheon of hunting and chasing. Our spiritual qualities are used to fit us for heavy physical labor, and when I was young I used to take twenty-five-mile hikes every day during my vacations, and when night came I needed nothing to relieve my boredom, for the pleasure of sitting down was all that was needed to satisfy me. But modern upliftment cannot be guided by these physically uplifting principles. A great deal of work is done sitting down, and much of the manual work uses only a specific portion of the muscles. When the crowds of London assembled in Trafalgar Square to loudly applaud the statement that the government had decided to send them to their deaths, they wouldn't have done that if they had walked twenty-five miles that day. It is impossible to cure militancy, in any case. If the human race is to survive - perhaps a thing that people don't like outside of war - it must be found as a stable and harmless outlet for our surplus energies, so that the quest for excitement can be channeled.
This is something that is seldom considered by either the moralists or the social reformers, who feel that they have more serious things to consider, or, on the other hand, by the moralists, who extremely exaggerate the seriousness of all the things that are used to divert people from the desire for excitement. Nonetheless, in their opinion, seriousness is about the seriousness of sin, such as dance halls, theaters, and period jazz are. If we believe that what we hear with our ears leads to hell, then we had better spend all our time sitting at home reflecting on our sins. I find myself unable to fully agree with the serious people who utter these warnings. The devil comes in many shapes and sizes. Some are used to deceive the young and some to deceive the older and serious. If it is the devil's work to lure the young into pleasure, might not it also be the work of the same devil to persuade the older to condemn the pleasure of the young? And might not condemnation be merely a matter of excitement assigned to the older? And is it not possible that condemnation would be like opium where the dose must be continually increased to produce the desired effect? And is it not possible that condemnation must fear that all, beginning with the evil cinema, we shall gradually lead to the condemnation of the opposing parties, the Italians, the Negroes of Southern Europe, the Asiatic immigrants, in short, every one but one of our faction. And it is exactly the kind of thing that should be condemned that is widely available to cause wars to happen. I've never heard of a war over a dance hall.
The seriousness of excitement is that it is destructive in its many forms; excitement is destructive to people who are drunk or addicted to gambling without self-control. It is also destructive when it brings about group violence. It is especially destructive when it leads to war. The need is so strong that it is likely to lead people to harmful forms of venting if harmless forms of venting are not readily available. There are currently so many harmless ways to vent in sports, and many in politics, provided those activities are conducted within the framework of the Constitution. But that's not enough, especially the kind of political activity that leads to mass agitation, which often leads to a lot of harm.
Human city life is too boring, and if it is to remain unchanged, it must provide some harmless outlet for impulses - the kind that our distant ancestors could satisfy simply by hunting. In Australia, where there are fewer people and more rabbits, I have seen a great many people satisfy their primitive urges by hunting thousands of rabbits with primitive skill. But in London or New York, where there are so many people and so few rabbits, there have to be other ways of pleasuring everybody. I think every bigger place should have a man-made waterfall that people can then slide down in flimsy canoes. And there should also be swimming pools filled with ferocious sharks, and anyone caught supporting preventive war should be thrown into the pool and punished by being punished for two hours a day with these dexterous monsters***.