John Fowles

ISOLATION

The old religions and philosophies were refuges, kind to man in a world that his ignorance of science and technology made unkind. Never try to pass us by, they always said, for behind us is nothing but misery and horror.

It is cold and bare outside, says the mother; but one day the child goes out. This age is still our first day out, and we feel ourselves alone; more free and more alone.

Our stereotyping societies force us to feel more alone. They stamp masks on us and isolate out real selves. We all live in two worlds: the old comfortable man-centred world of absolutes and the harsh real world of relatives. The latter, the relativity reality, terrifies us; and isolates and dwarfs us all.

Greater social concern may, paradoxically, only increase this isolation. The more society interferes and supervises and plays the good Samaritan, the less needed and lonelier the secret individual gets.

More and more we know how far we are from the persons we should like to be. Less and less do we believe that a man can be any other than he is born and conditioned to be. The more science reveals our mechanical nature the more a harried ‘free’ man, a Robin Hood in each, retreats into the forests of the private mind.

Yet all these lonelinesses are a part of our growing up, of our first going out alone, of our freedom. A child is protected from such fear and loneliness by having a falsely kind and simple mirage erected around him. He grows up and goes out into loneliness and reality and there he builds a more real protection against his isolation out of love and friendship and feeling for his fellow men.

Once again the indifferent process of infinity seems at first sight to have trapped us into a corner. But we are trapped only by our own stupidity and weakness. The escape is clear.

THE ANXIETIES

Anxiety is the name we give to an unpleasant effect on us, and personal to us, of the general necessity for hazard. All anxieties are in some sense goads. They may goad the weak beyond endurance; but it is essential that humanity as a whole is goaded.

In a happy world all anxieties would be games. An anxiety is a lack that causes pain; a game is a lack that causes pleasure. Two different men in identical circumstances: what one may feel is an anxiety, while to the other it is a game.

Anxieties are tensions between a pole in our real life and a counter pole in the life we imagine we would like to lead.

There are esoteric metaphysical anxieties and practical daily anxieties. There are fundamental universal anxieties and special individual anxieties. The more sensitive and self-conscious and aware of other man becomes, the more anxious, in his present ill-organized world, he is going to become.

Anxieties:

The anxiety of the ignorance of the meaning of life
The anxiety of not knowing the future.
The anxiety of death.
The anxiety of choosing right. Where will my choices lead? Can I choose?
The anxiety of otherness. All is other to me, including most of myself.
The anxiety of responsibility
The anxiety of inability to love and help others:
Our family, our friends, our country, all men. This is aggravated by our increased other-awareness.
The anxiety of not being loved by others.
The anxieties of the republica –social injustice, the H-bomb, starvation, racialism, brink policies, chauvinism, and the rest.
The anxiety of ambition. An I the person I want to be? Am I the person other (my employers, my family, my friends) want me to be?
The anxieties of social position. Of class, of birth, of money, of status in society.
The anxiety of money. Have I the necessities of life: There are situations in which a private yacht and a gallery of old master may seem necessities of life.
The anxiety of time. Have I the time to do what I want?
The anxiety of sex.
The anxiety of work. Am I doing the right work?
Am I doing it as well as it needs to be done?
The anxiety of health

To be alone in an office - dozens of telephones all ringing at the same time. These anxieties should make us one. We all feel them. But we let them isolate us, as if the citizens of a country would defend it by each barricading himself in his own house.

HAZARD

My only certainty in life is that I shall one day die. I can be certain of nothing else in the future. But either we survive (and so far in human history a vast majority has always survived) and having survived when we might not have done so gives us what we call happiness; or we do not survive and do not know it.

Hazard is essential for an evolutionary process. Some personal effects of it make us unhappy, because hazard is by definition inegalitarian. It is indifferent to law and to justice, as we understand those terms.

The purpose of hazard is to force us, and the rest of matter, to evolve. It is only by evolving that we, in a process that is evolving, can continue to survive. The purpose of human evolution is therefore to recognize this: that we must evolve to exist. And that we should extirpate unnecessary inequality - in other words, limit hazard in the human sphere - is an obvious corollary. There is therefore no more sense in being unhappy at hazard in general than there is in hating hands because they can be cut off; or in not taking every precaution to see that they shall not be cut off.

ENVY

Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poorer do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have also never been more widespread.

Each age has its mythical happy man: the one with wisdom, with genius, with saintliness, with beauty, with whatever is rare and the Many are not able to possess. The twentieth century's happy man is the man with money. Since our belief in a rewarding afterlife has decayed more quickly than our capacity to create a rewarding present life has grown, there was never a fiercer determination touch the paragon.

We are born with cleverness, beauty and the seeds of greatness. But money is something different. We say 'he was born rich'; but that is precisely what he was not. He may have been born into a rich family, of rich parents. One is born intelligent or beautiful, but the distribution of intelligence, beauty and the other enviable human qualities, is remediable. It is a field in which envy can act. The human situation seems to the Many outrageous enough without this additional un-stomachable outrage of vast inequality in the distribution of wealth. How dare a millionaire's son be the son of a millionaire.

The three great historical rejections:

the rejection of lack of political freedom;
the rejection of irrational systems of social cost;
the rejection of gross inequality in wealth.

The first rejection began with the French Revolution; the second is in progress; the third begins.

Free enterprise, as we understand it, is to allow a man to become as rich as he likes.

That is not free enterprise, but free vampirism.

The great twentieth-century equation is that I = your. And the great twentieth-century envy is that I am less than you.

Like every other fact, this ubiquitous envy, this desire to equalize the wealth of the world, is a utility. Its use is obvious: it will force, is already forcing, in the form of the Cold War, the richer countries to disgorge their wealth, literal and metaphorical.

The flaws of a utility are the seeds of its obsolescence. There are two main flaws in this envy. The first is that it is based on the assumption that having money and being happy are synonymous. In a capitalist society they very largely are: but this is not in the nature of things. It is simply in the nature of a capitalist society; and this supposition that wealth is the only ticket to happiness, a supposition the capitalist society must encourage if it is to exist, is one that will finally enforce profound changes in such societies.

A capitalist society conditions its members to envy and be envied; but this conditioning is a form of movement; and the movement will be out of the capitalist society into a better one. I am not saying, an Marx did, that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction; but that it contains the seeds of its own transformation. And that it is high time it started to nurture those seeds.

The second flaw in this envy is that it equalizes; and all equalization tends to stagnancy. We must have the equalization, but we do not want the stagnation. This argument from stasis, that inequality is a reservoir of evolutional energy, is one of the most powerful on the side of the advocates of inequality - the rich. Total inequality in wealth, our present condition, is unsatisfactory; and comparative equality of wealth, the situation we are painfully and crotchety moving into, is full of danger. We need some other eventual situation.

What is this envy, this dreadful groping of the thin fingers of the world's poor for the way of life and the knowledge and the wealth we have over the centuries stored up in the West? It is humanity. Humanity is this envy, this desire on the one side to hold, this desire on the other to take. As the mob screams in front of the embassy, as bitter lies foul the wave-length, as the viciously rich grow more selfish and the savagely poor more desperate, as race hates race, as thousands of isolated incidents seem to inflame this last great conflict of man against man, it may seem that this envy is a terrible thing. But I believe, and this is a situation where believing is initially more important than reasoning, that the great sane core of mankind will see this envy for what it really is: a great force to make humanity more human, a situation allowing only one solution - responsibility.

What we are before is like a strait, a tricky road, a passage where we need courage and reason. The courage to go on, not to try to turn back; and the reason to use reason; not fear, not jealousy, not envy, but reason. We must steer by reason, and jettison - because much must go - by reason.

Where we are now is where Columbus stood; and looked to see.