The technical life-order which came into being for the supply of the needs of the masses did at the outset preserve these real worlds of human creatures, by furnishing them with commodities. But when at length the time arrived when nothing in the individual’s immediate and real environing world was any longer made, shaped, or fashioned by that individual for his own purposes; when everything that came, came merely as the gratification of momentary need, to be used up and cast aside; when the very dwelling-place was machine-made, when the environment had become despiritualised, when the day’s work grew sufficient to itself and ceased to be built up into a constituent of the worker’s life—then man was, as it were, bereft of his world. Cast adrift in this way, lacking all sense of historical continuity with past or future, man cannot remain man. The universalisation of the life-order threatens to reduce the life of the real man in a real world to mere functioning.
But man as individual refuses to allow himself to be absorbed into a life-order which would only leave him in being as a function for the maintenance of the whole. True, he can live in the apparatus with the aid of a thousand relationships on which he is dependent and in which he collaborates; but since he has become a mere replaceable cog in a wheelwork regardless of his individuality, he rebels if there is no other way in which he can manifest his selfhood.
If, however, he wants to be himself, if he craves for self-expression, there promptly arises a tension between his self-preservative impulse, on the one hand, and his real selfhood, on the other. Immediate self-will is what primarily moves him, for he is animated by a blind desire for the advantages attendant on making good in the struggle for life. Yet the urge to self-expression drives him into incalculable hazards which may render his means of livelihood perilously insecure. Under stress of these two conflicting impulses he may act in ways which will interfere with the tranquil and stable functioning of the life-order. Consequently the disturbance of the life-order has its permanent antinomy in a twofold possibility. Inasmuch as self-will provides the space wherein selfhood can realise itself as existence, the former is as it were the body of the latter, and may drag the latter down to ruin or (in favourable circumstances) bring it to fruition.
If, then, self-will and existence both seek a world for themselves, they come into conflict with the universal life-order. But this, in its turn, strives to gain mastery over the powers which are threatening its frontiers. It is, therefore, profoundly concerned about matters which are not directly contributory to the self-preservative impulse. This latter, which can be indifferently regarded as a vital need for obtaining the necessaries of life and as an existential absolute, may be termed the ‘non-rational.’ When thus negatively conceived, it is degraded to a being of the second order: but it is either promoted once more to the first rank within certain restricted provinces; in contrast with purely rational aims, it may acquire a positive interest, as in love, adventure, sport, and play. Or it may be resisted as undesirable, this being what we see in those who are affected with a dread of life or a lack of joy in work. Thus in one or other of these ways it is diverted into the decisively and exclusively vital field—to the denial of the claim to existence slumbering within it. The powers interested in the functioning of the apparatus, in the paralysing of the masses, in the individual mind, seek to further the demands of the self-preservative impulse as a non-committal gratification, and to deprive it of its possible absoluteness. By rationalising the non-rational, in order to re-establish it as a kind of gratification of elementary needs, the attempt is made to achieve that which is not genuinely possible. The result is that what was originally fostered as something other than it is, is destroyed by what seems to be an endeavour to care for it. A prey to technical domi-nance, it assumes a grey tint or a crude motley colora-tion, wherein man no longer recognises himself, being robbed of his individuality as a human creature. Yet, since it is uncontrollable, it rides rough-shod over the ordinances formulated to destroy it.