One could hardly put it better than Sir Charles Chaplin in The Great Dictator – emphasis added:
I'm sorry, but I don't want
to be an emperor.
That's not my business.
I don't want to rule or
conquer anyone.
I should like to help
everyone if possible.
Jew - Gentile - Black Man,
White.
We all want to help one
another, human beings are like that.
We want to live by each
other's happiness.
Not by each other's misery.
We don't want to hate and
despise one another.
And this world has room for
everyone, and the good Earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
The way of life can be free
and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men's
souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and
bloodshed.
We have developed speed,
but we have shut ourselves in.
Machinery that gives us
abundance has left us in want.
Our knowledge has made us cynical.
Our cleverness, hard and
unkind.
We think too much, and feel
too little.
More than machinery, we
need humanity.
More that cleverness, we
need kindness and gentleness.
Without these qualities
life will be violent, and all will be lost.
The aeroplane and the radio
have brought us closer together.
The very nature of these
inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal
brotherhood - for the unity of us all.
Even now my voice is
reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and
little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent
people.
To those who can hear me, I
say - do not despair.
The misery that is now upon
us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of
human progress.
The hate of men will pass,
and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the
people.
And so long as men die,
liberty will never perish. ...
Soldiers!
Don't give yourselves to brutes
- men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what
to do - what to think and what to feel!
Who drill you - diet you -
treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder.
Don't give yourselves to
these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts!
You are not machines!
You are not cattle!
You are men!
You have the love of
humanity in your hearts!
You don't hate!
Only the unloved hate - the
unloved and the unnatural!
Soldiers!
Don't fight for slavery!
Fight for liberty!
In the 17th Chapter of St
Luke it is written: "the Kingdom of God is within man" - not one man
nor a group of men, but in all men!
In you!
You, the people have the
power - the power to create machines.
The power to create
happiness!
You, the people, have the
power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful
adventure.
Then - in the name of
democracy - let us use that power - let us all unite.
Let us fight for a new
world - a decent world that will give men a chance to work - that will give
youth a future and old age a security.
By the promise of these
things, brutes have risen to power.
But they lie!
They do not fulfil that
promise.
They never will!
Dictators free themselves
but they enslave the people!
Now let us fight to fulfil
that promise!
Let us fight to free the
world - to do away with national barriers - to do away with greed, with hate
and intolerance.
Let us fight for a world of
reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.
Soldiers!
In the name of democracy,
let us all unite!
Sir Charles produced these words as long ago as 1940, over 80 years ago, which makes it even more visionary, as it sounds as if this was said only rather more recently. How he could see so far ahead is impressive. Some of the themes are of course timeless but for example the views on humanity-eradicating and planet-destroying polluting unbridled greedy industrialisation seem now particularly visionary in 1940 long before the environmental emergency reached its current high levels threatening our whole existence:
More than machinery, we need humanity.
Aldous Huxley also wrote in the 1930s already in a sombre tone in confusd society which he felt to be spinning dangerously out of control and his Brave New World of 1932 he warned against the dehumanising aspects of scientific and material 'progress'.
Another fine person with a vision, Friherrinnan Karen von Blixen has inspiring words for us in her Out of Africa of 1937:
We ourselves, in boots, and in our constant great hurry, often jar with the landscape. The Natives are in accordance with it...
... [a]s far as receptivity of ideas goes the Native is more of a man of the world than the suburban or provincial settler or missionary, who has grown up in a uniform community with a set of stable ideas. Much of the misunderstanding between white people and the Natives arises from this fact.’
A bigot is defined as 'a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.'
Giuseppe Principe di Lampedusa wrote about:
... the corruption of the classical Mediterranean world by subsequent history. Lighea may have been 'ignorant of all culture, unaware of all wisdom, contemptuous of any moral inhibitions, [but] she belonged, even so, to the fountainhead of all culture, of all wisdom, of all ethics, and could express this primigenial superiority of hers in terms of rugged beauty'. She was part of an ancient, innocent and, above all, vital world, the archaic Sicily of the first Greek colonists, the fertile, wooded and primeval island of the pagan deities. Lucio Piccolo would have endorsed this view of mythological Sicily as 'real' Sicily, 'nature's Sicily', its vocation 'that of serving as pasturage for the herds of the sun'. All this has been swept away, though, in the accumulating centuries of man's progress. The Leopard describes the decay of a noble family and the destruction of a certain society; 'Lighea' has a grander theme, the ruin of the Mediterranean and classical world over more than two thousand years (The Last Leopard by David Gilmour, 2007, pp. 164-165).
Giuseppe di Lampedusa did not write only about Sicily of course but of 'the central problems of the human experience' (ibid. p. 214).
That still little is done to save our world despite the signs having been predicted so long ago is discouraging. Indeed, at worst one could say Sir Charles was an idealist or even utopist but it is still undeniably giving a timeless reminder of real values in life.
A more recent view from cinema is in Luchino Visconti’s Conversation Piece (1974) where the elegant old professor played by Burt Lancaster says:
... the price of progress is destruction. ... modern science cannot be neutral. In its attempt to be useful, science has turned technology’s power to liberate into a kind of slavery...
Geno Pampaloni stressed the handling by Giuseppe Principe di Lampedusa in The Leopard of an 'epoch of transition' during which precious things are inevitably thrown out with the old (Geno Pamploni, 'Il Gattopardo' in A. Moravia and E. Zolla, Saggi Italiani 1959 (1960), p. 134). The liberal politician and writer, Luigi Barzini, agreed, arguing that The Leopard's theme was (emphasis added, otherwise as quoted in The Last Leopard by David Gilmour, 2007, p. 206):
... the inevitable decline, which cannot be halted, of the old virtues and graces that have grown useless but made life human even for the humble people; the triumph of other qualities, rougher but essential in the modern world, which do not correct the old injustices but often merely show them up, make them unbearable, and replace them with others that are sometimes crueller and worse. (Luigi Barzini From Caesar to the Mafia (1971), p. 221)
One can question whether these other qualities are essential in the modern world or there is something very wrong with the modernity in question, that modernity being much more wrong than what it purported to correct, one of the best examples being the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 creating far worse oppression then before of industrial proportions.
As Monsieur Gustave during the Second World War said in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014):
There are still faint glimmers of civilisation left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.
One can add detail or clarification. For example, democracy alone is in danger of falling into populism and for that reason a mixed constitution can even strengthen democracy by paradoxically technically undemocratic elements like monarchy and aristocracy within limits, as in the fine theories since Plato.
The Devil's most successful entreprise so far has been industrialisation of not only manufacture but agriculture, architecture, corruption, populism, persecution, war, disease... all united together in the contemporary upstart-extremist form of capitalism. It has brought us the wonderful technological progress which, for example, leaves us capable of producing a boiler that does not last too long.
It seems to be a somewhat capitalist idea that it would be "idle" to simply live a life of reading books and embracing culture and civilisation. The contemporary philistine capitalist seems to think that we all need to be busy screwing the world, quite literally in some manufacturing jobs. Yet arguably it is much more natural for a human being to live a life which gives time to to taste the world rather than waste and lose one's life in "working" hard for the benefit of someone else that does not even understand the value of life, faux progress of the unsophisticated petty-minded bourgeoisie.
Sadism has been defined as the absolute lack of compassion towards ones fellow beings. A 'bourgeois wish for personal security while inflicting unlimited harm upon others is another characteristic of sadism', according to Walter Braun (The Cruel & The Meek, 1996, Senate; emphasis added). The bourgeois capitalism which only seeks to materially profit the uncivilised upstarts in power with no regard to the welfare of others or even the planet is therefore not only sadism but the worst kind of sadism.
In one way our world has gone backwards in that we know so much more now than we did before and therefore have so much less of an excuse for failing to put things right. In the past the defence of ignorance might have mitigated more than it can now. Yet if anything our greed has been industrialised rather than manufacturing or anything else.
If that is the best progress and science can achieve, one might as well believe in a religion or political ideology almost or they may all complement, balance and improve each other like the components of a mixed constitution. Indeed Friherrinnan von Blixen wrote (ibid.):
Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons or divided the substance.
Then again many good ideas, ideologies like democracy, and religions have been knowingly abused for self-interest but one may also be wise to remember that the "road to hell is paved with good intentions" and therefore it is important to remain pragmatic and realist and not an absolutist ideological idealist.
