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p The criticism that the sense of wretchedness levels at the sense of contentedness, at its ideals, guidelines, myths of official optimism, is ruthless and destructive in content and high-strung in form. Without beating about the bush the sense of contentedness is called by the name it merits: an artificial and manipulated frame of mind. Irony, too, has its place—covert and overt: the proponents of the sense of contentedness are called robots, mannequins, gregarious or one-dimensional people, petty individuals, and so on. The criticism of society has a large spectrum of shades, which it would simply be difficult to list in one breath.

p The main accusation is brief but .weighty, namely, that the sense of contentedness is a superficial view of the world. Nihilism claims to have brought to light the essence behind the outward show of welfare, order, rationality and exemplary prosperity. Like a nest of wooden dolls the world of expediency, “general welfare”, security and “sacrosanct” morals contains another world. It is asserted that the sense of wretchedness has the mission of tearing off the cover and 123 showing the other, actual reality. It aims to show all the mechanisms by which well-being is feigned. It will then become clear that actually this world is absurd and illogical, that alienation, violence, social conflicts, brutality and wars reign in it.

p Nihilism does not spare details and colours to unfold the picture of man’s alienated existence. There is no need for reproducing this picture here in detail. Suffice it to note that any society, mostly a technically developed society, is the target of nihilism’s angry and allegedly radical criticism. It vents its fury not on bourgeois social relations, not on capitalism’s modes of using machinery, but on machinery and social organisation as such. In machinery is embodied past labour, the labour of past generations. It adds live labour to itself. This is how production proceeds. With the development of machinery an ever lesser amount of live labour remains in the product. And this product, representing materialised labour, becomes the unchallenged master of people in capitalist society. The dead prevail over the living, creation over its creator, machinery over the working people, and society over the individual.

p Developing in accordance with its own laws that do not depend on and are not controlled by man, machinery is allegedly getting out of control; without any pause at all it is converting man into a robot. High labour productivity and the technical might on which the social organisation with its stability rests determine the aims, the orientation and results of man’s activity. They produce not merely the goods and services vital to man, but even man himself, entirely predetermining his consciousness and behaviour. In the age of the consumer society and the scientific and technological revolution and automation, the scale, depth and totality of alienation are becoming such that the antithesis between machinery and the social organisation, on the one hand, and man, on the other, is growing unbearable, crisis-laden and is harbouring the threat of a universal catastrophe.

p Such is nihilistic criticism’s portrayal of the effects of the scientific and technological revolution. Have the interminable technical upheavals, nihilism asks, not led to the rigid labour discipline forced upon people? Are they not subjecting man to humiliating schooling, reducing all the 124 wealth of his life to the function of a producer and operator of machines? Were they not what dragged him into the whirlpool of mammoth dehumanised organisations subordinated to feeble-minded bureaucratic leadership? Does not machinery foist upon people a rhythm of labour and rest that comes into conflict with their physiological nature? Does not automation, which fosters the mania of consumption and uninterruptedly reproduces vulgarity of the sense of contentedness, lead to dehumanisation? Is it not machinery, which engenders worship of comfort and then even greater dependence on it than before, depreciate the spiritual element? Was machinery not the means that allowed creating a formidable system of mass manipulation, thereby rendering the individual helpless in the face of the power of unprincipled politicians? Only a consciousness exhausted by the burden of contentedness hopes to cope with the technical danger with the aid of technical counter-means, to force a “humanistic muzzle" on machinery.

p Technical rationalisation, nihilistic criticism asserts, has not advanced social rationalisation an iota. In the illogical capitalist world social order is cracking disgracefully as though mocking at the hopes of reason. Behind the facade of industrial society’s rationality is not a commonwealth of people but a forcibly created community, within which a ruthless struggle for existence is steadily escalating. In this society elementary order is maintained by isolating the spirit, by suppressing the individual’s desire for independence and resistance.

p Using many ways and means, from undisguised intimidation and violence to a system of sops and refined inculcation, capitalist society strangles the individual’s ability for free self-expression, for independent and responsible behaviour. It hinders understanding of really important problems, soothes anxiety and pretends that these problems do not exist at all. It degrades people and fosters its own convictions. It does all in its power to mediate the individual. All these values inculcated by bourgeois society are false. They disarm the individual socially and morally, accustom him to regarding the existing order as the only worthy one, proper and “sacred”, teach him to perform his social role submissively, to cling to the symbols of spurious happiness, 125 to fight for aims reflecting imaginary or foolish needs, which in the main do not go beyond attachment to monotonous or crude pleasures.

p But this is not all. As nihilism sees it, production itself cannot be rationalised and social life cannot be stable without an all-powerful, alienated bureaucracy, regarded as a constant source of idiocy that pressures man without any ill-will, much as an earthquake or a typhoon. Its victims are both the entrepreneur and the worker, the engineer and the shopkeeper, the office employee and the newspaperman, the official and the priest. Like death it is the greatest leveller.

p The state of the alienated individual in capitalist society is described by nihilistic criticism in terms such as loneliness, neglect and emptiness. It holds that the bonds between capitalist society and the individual have been severed, and that the latter is alienated from history; both sides seek to utilise each other with cold indifference, and the relations between people are perverted. People isolate themselves in production and in everyday life. The link between them is a dialogue of deaf persons, each finding in the other a wall of incomprehension. Everybody else is regarded solely as a means, not as an aim. But in striving to sell himself most profitably (the so-called market orientation), the individual uses himself also solely as a means. Man is separated, as it were, from himself, ceases to be the master of his actions, becomes a slave of things, false desires, stirred instincts, and the norms forced upon him. He lives in a state in which he loses trust in himself, in others, and in society.

p Perhaps, nothing irritates the sense of wretchedness more than the idea of moral progress. It believes that material troubles are being superseded by moral troubles, and that the old saying “man unto man is a wolf" conveys exactly the state of affairs in the sphere of morals. Man’s nature has allegedly not improved in any way since the day Cain killed Abel. Morals have, so to say, only made man more sophisticated without affecting his primary nature. He is simply compelled to work, to reckon with the rules of social behaviour, to submit to social institutions and adapt himself to rational organisation. The sense of wretchedness 126 refers to the incredible baseness of competitive struggles for success, the bribes, the corruption, the industrial espionage, the bugging, the cheating through advertising, the increasingly more frequent violations of institutional standards in the attainment of set objectives, the growth of crime and the sexual dissolution.

p Moreover, the omnipotent bourgeois social organisation and technological progress are leading culture and art into an impasse. Outwardly, they seem to be burgeoning quantitatively. But in fact culture and art are alienated from the mass consumer. Their place is taken by all sorts of substitutes as counterfeit as the consciousness of the consumer himself. The latter is unable to make an independent assessment of the products offered him: it is easier to choose a fashionable necktie than to find a masterpiece among the innumerable mass substitutes. Emasculated bourgeois art likewise promotes only such association among people as is consonant with the aims of the capitalist system and fosters views approved by it. Art is becoming a lever for switching attention to the required direction and a vehicle of meaningless pleasure. The artist who refuses to serve the bourgeois organisation is, under these conditions, forced to react to mass art with absurd elitarian art, and respond to facelessness with intense and morbid individualism. This explains the ossification of art, its backward steps, its degradation. The sense of wretchedness continues the aphorism “We have aircraft but no Shakespeare" as follows: “The aircraft was followed by the spaceship, but there is still no Shakespeare and his appearance is not foreseen.”

p Depresised at every turn by repellent, demoralising capitalist reality, man strives to escape it, to hide at any cost. Called escapism, this is exemplified by the fact that the family is becoming an oasis in the hostile desert of bourgeois society, a quiet harbour where shelter can be found in a storm! It manifests itself when sports and pleasures begin to be taken more seriously than the work that has in principle become alien to man and no longer brings him satisfaction.

p But, continue the theoreticians of the sense of wretchedness, there is the ridiculously na’ive belief that in capitalist society a person quitting the factory or office can escape 127 from the grip of machinery and bureaucracy. The family bears the imprint of all the social dramas from which man seeks to escape. Mass enjoyment likewise serves as an instrument of spiritual manipulation. Common conflicts become even more unbearable. In one way or another, escapist diversion and the primitiveness and poverty of sports passions accentuate the painful contrast between artificial pleasures, alienated emotions and man’s actual feelings springing from his actual position in capitalist society, between what is and what people would like, between real and imaginary existence.

p Besides, man continues to be wracked by boredom—-boredom laden with indifference and anxiety, with hardly concealed aimlessness and inner discontent with the course of life in capitalist society, a boredom that cannot be cured by distraction. Man who lacks originality and full-blooded relationships burns with the need to kill time at all costs, to make himself insensitive to the burden of existence. Torture by boredom is bourgeois society’s main form of suffering. It generates unmotivated crime, brutality and indifference to the sorrows and joys of others.

p To free himself of the boredom of existence, satisfy the craving for an inner, cherished, intimate private meaning to his vital activity, which at the price of perseverance and intensive effort he has safeguarded against regulation by capitalist-serving rationalism, by official “scientific leadership" in the pseudo-collectivist organisations, man turns to the spiritual vacuum-filler obligingly offered him by mass culture. This “saviour” from the torments of boredom gives him the possibility (even if it is only a nightly possibility) of asserting himself outside the bounds of professionalism, outside the organisation forced upon him. This helps him to resolve the oppressive collision between impersonal contacts, in which he increasingly comes forward as a proponent of accurate knowledge (this is required by the scientific and technological revolution), and the sphere of general culture, in which he is a “mosaic individual”, a casually informed individual. He is, therefore, not put out by the fact that mass culture, with all its fictitiousness, only “envelops the audience in a warm bath, making no demands except that we all glow with pleasure and comfort”.  [127•*  Further, the 128 attraction for the crude pleasures of mass culture is due to the need to stifle latent fear, the sense of uncertainty, the thirst for relaxation by the least possible mental and emotional effort. Antonio Gramsci wrote that there is boredom making the adventurism of the imbibed culture a need. But there is also concealed adventurism springing from fear of hopelessness, from the uncertainty of stunted well-being. People feel they are adventurists not by their own will and loathe this sort of adventurism. Hence their growing attraction for “sparkling” adventure that would give life a meaning and remove the uncertainty of commonplace existence.

p Wishing to decree his own happiness, which he does not expect in capitalist society, man paralyses all his aspirations, making drug-addiction his sole aim. Ibsen’s Peer Gynt was offered to have his left eye injured, being told that although he would squint slightly everything in his vision would seem beautiful and pleasing. Thus it is with drugaddiction. This explains the flood of stimulants and tranquillisers, which are called happiness pills. The addiction to these pills, used not as drug but as a means of artificially evoking a sense of well-being and certainty, is spreading with incredible speed in capitalist society. Society is being tranquillised, a French doctor noted, writing of his apprehensions that people will stop fighting their own weaknesses, that they will no longer have pangs of conscience and that they will let themselves fade into blissful lethargy. The temptation to find oneself, if only briefly, in the iridescent atmosphere of a dazzling and meaningful life devoid of the paroxysms of despair, of physical and moral suffering, proves to be stronger than legislative interdictions, moral bans and consumer or sceptical ideals.

p Much as the troops of a defeated army wander back to their homes, mankind, the sense of wretchedness foretells, is threatened with departure from the scene of history, with dissolution in the back streets of happiness, of boisterous or quiet escapism. The orientation on pill-generated happiness, on drug-addiction leads directly to intellectual and 129 moral degradation, to civic death, to physical degeneration, to the disintegration of the individual. Are there in this case any grounds for believing in technological prosperity, in the advertised social peace, in medical Messianism? nihilism asks. It holds that the sense of contentedness and industrial society cannot suggest a solution to the fateful problem of neohedonism.

p In the attacks launched by the sense of wretchedness on the social organisation, the key, culminating point is, perhaps, its criticism of science. Science—and in this is regarded its cardinal sin—reduces man to the status of an object among other objects, a thing among other things. It gives knowledge and power, which do not affect the cherished aspects of man’s existence, consequently giving something external relative to him; it has become used to regarding man exclusively from the standpoint of his production capacity and as an element of the continuously functioning social system.

p However, the sense of wretchedness argues, there is in man something that is devoid of object characteristics and is therefore uncognisable, like a thing in itself, -slipping away from the keen attention of science. This is what makes man a free and responsible being. His freedom seems to be boundless, spontaneous and causally undeducible from his biological nature and the social relations into which he is drawn. As the sense of wretchedness sees it, the question “What am I?" (and, therefore, “What must I be?”) cannot be scientifically answered: the competence of science ends at the threshold of this most important question.

p It is asserted that the most subtle instruments of analytic study developed by psychology, biology and the social sciences are quite useless when the Socratic maxim of “know yourself" has to be implemented. It is claimed that here science gives fake knowledge of man, that it allows bringing to light and describing the convictions of people belonging to different social groups, that it is able to forecast even what will occur if a certain change of convictions takes place, but it is fundamentally powerless to formulate and substantiate any convictions. “Scientific convictions”, a “scientific world outlook" and the “science of happiness and the meaning of life" are branded as nonsense by the sense of 130 wretchedness. Not only does science fail to make man happier, but it gives birth to the absurd confidence that the formula of happiness has been found or that it is not even needed. Many people expect miracles of science, just as they had once expected of religion, but, it is asserted, it only confuses man, destroys established values and ways of life, giving nothing in return.

p With its anti-scientific affectation, the sense of wretchedness not only draws attention to the fact that science has given man the weapons for self-destruction but also accentuates science’s role in consolidating “degenerate” social reality, its participation in moulding a mass utilitarian orientation. The sense of wretchedness is particularly faultfinding relative to the social sciences. In its eyes they have irremediably compromised themselves by being engaged either in providing the bourgeois social organisation with direct functional services or in abstract theorising in order to conceal the irrationality of social life. Where their theories are concerned, it asks a question only about one of their aspects: Are they apologetic? Only that theory is said to be creditable which serves nobody’s interests. But since such theories cannot be found, all are unconditionally rejected one after another. So far as the sense of wretchedness is concerned, the question of whether the given theory provides authentic knowledge is immaterial. Further, the more accurate the knowledge in a theory the more it is regarded as a dangerous instrument in the hands of society hostile to an individual.

p The sense of wretchedness sums up its criticism of society, science and technology in the following conclusions. In the world of consumption man ceases to be the maker of history and culture. It would even be absurd to ask if in the course of history man becomes happier. He wants to use science and technology to make himself the master of the world, but every step in that direction leads to the individual’s ruin and self-destruction. In our day man has fallen victim to the “terror of the commonplace”. He is entangled in a web of suffering and gripped by fear. This is not the usual fear controlled by the consciousness and perceived by it as a psycho-physiological signal of danger, as a call for the mobilisation of all forms of energy for self-defence. It is a 131 general fear, which does not directly menace a person’s health or his property, relationships, status or life. Dreading an encounter with this fear man strives to hide in bustle, in dayto-day routine, in preoccupation. The sense of contentedness (or, to put it in another way, the ungenuine, herd existence) is precisely a means of fleeing this fear. Even though man has somehow found refuge in society, acquiring some tranquillity in consumer cares, he is returned to his encounter with fear by the course of life. He is haunted by vague anxiety, by a sense of helplessness and isolation. He experiences fear of some incomprehensible and sinister force, of awaiting his end, his doom. Fear is the payment for consumer service. Never before has there been so deep an abyss between the vaunted outward well-being, the delusive happiness presented to the masses by highly developed civilisation, and the actual but concealed unhappiness, the bitter sense of dissatisfaction, fear, despair, and universal and chronic neurosis. Such is the result of the nihilistic criticism of capitalist society. The sense of wretchedness is actually a sense of contentedness, camouflaged and dulled by all forms of social drug-addiction.

p So far we have considered only the postulates of and approaches to nihilism. One can enter its main mansion only by examining the question of the attitude to the alienated world that gives birth to fear and despair. Can the spell of alienation be lifted or is it inevitable? This is the question of questions.

p Having laid bare and demonstrated the emptiness, danger and duplicity of the reasonable-unreasonable world, the sense of wretchedness, elevated to the philosophical level of reflection, resolutely rises up in arms against the view that it is somehow possible to rectify the state of affairs, to counter the course of events.

p Nihilism asks: On what can the hopes for the future be founded? Is there some other way of judging the future except on the basis of an extrapolated knowledge of the past and the present? It is childish to destroy machines. The steam-roller of scientific and technological progress cannot be stopped. Interrelated, scientific and technological progress and social development will allegedly keep on intensifying greatly instead of removing from man the curse of alienation, 132 the despotism of organisation, machines and things. There is no certainty whatever that science and its applied achievements will cease to be used for purposes that have the least to do with the welfare of people, with the humanitarian designation of science and the intentions of scientists.

p From the standpoint of the sense of wretchedness, labour and social activity remain alienated, even if the pressure of necessity, of direct material need is eased. The tutelage of the bureaucratic machine will be increasingly brutal, and the corridors of power will become even darker and more labyrinthine. Consequently, this will reinforce the outward determination of behaviour, which turns man into an easily replaceable, standard part of the social mechanism. This will lead to the further growth of irresponsibility, onedimensionalism, moral barrenness and the consolidation of belief in all sorts of substitutes of a happy life. Man increasingly ceases to be himself, identifying himself with elements of machinery and objects of consumption. Orientated on comfort and accustomed to look for and press the buttons of happiness, people will, it is alleged, ultimately lose their ability to solve problems in a manner befitting man.

p Continuing its hyperbolic, grotesque portrayal of the future, nihilism contends that social, political, racial and national conflicts will not.be settled. Post-industrial society, in which arbitrary rule and violence replace and are given out for freedom, will remain in disharmony, for the conflict between the personal and the social has no prospects for a historical settlement. Social movements? No, they are merely forms of mass hysteria, of social intoxication, and comprise new and as yet only ascendant forms of super-alienation. Even if a classless society were built, it would still, in its depths, have this conflict as acute as ever, as a universal social conflict differing from the class struggle, described as a sporadic form of that conflict. It would even be impossible to hope that the bottomless pit of alienation lying between people, and between the individual and society, would ever be filled; any attempt to give effect to the “therapeutic” programmes of “social clinicists" would prove to be quackery. The most fervent admirers of social engineering are finding that manipulators are becoming ordinary consultants or clerks of the bourgeois organisation.

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p This social organisation cannot introduce real order, for it generates chaos in people’s minds, even though it strives to inject abstract accuracy, pedantic regulation and planning in human relations. It is claimed that for that reason nothing can halt the growth of neurotism with its fatal consequences—aggressive behaviour, unmotivated suicides (in many cases incited by consumer excesses or unbearable loneliness), unchecked waste, a spirit of destruction, an inferiority complex, a sense of own insignificance or paroxysms of authoritarianism.

p Nihilism considers that there is every indication that the shameless luxury of rich countries and the glaring poverty of undeveloped nations will continue to coexist; that social parasitism will not disappear; that the sense of contentedness, which regards social order as unquestioned and propagates philistinism, vulgarity and irresponsibility on a growing scale, will go on reproducing itself; that each step forward takes mankind ever farther from peace of mind and the grandeur of spirit, from integrity, albeit primitive, that is the only source of human happiness.

p After this gloomy picture of society’s future, the sense of wretchedness lists the familiar threats to civilisation. The same package held aloft by the sense of contentedness, with the same non-class approach to the causes, and manifestations of these threats. The only difference is that it flatly rejects any radical way of resolving them and the belief that there may be any improvement. For the sense of wretchedness threats evolve into a despair complex. Here is the list of threats: man is allegedly degenerating anthropologically, diseases are civilisation’s constant fellow-travellers; modern form of labour and life are beyond man’s adaptive capabilities, and this results in nervous and mental overstresses and is the cause of some somatic illnesses; a healthy people is a gorgeous dream, nothing more; pollution of air and water, the death of animals, exhaustion of soil and minerals, destruction of quiet, aesthetic desecration of the earth, the withering of familiar landscapes and their replacement by industry-scapes—that is what lies in store for people. Nature, continues this insatiable criticism, is yielding to the furious onslaught of human restiveness; devastated and overwhelmed, it is collapsing and dying. However, man is paying 134 long and painfully for his ingratitude, because all the threats, precipitated and slighted with incredible frivolity by civilisation itself, operate not only as a factor furthering mankind’s emotional and physical impoverishment but also as a factor dehumanising the social life and the relations between people. Nature will not, as had formerly been the case, allow man’s nervous system any rest; it will no longer serve as a vent from the crowded life of dirty towns, which are becoming gigantic necropolises.

p Present-day prosperity, nihilism says, is proceeding in a nightmare situation: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Man has devised means of self-destruction, is endeavouring to improve them and is allegedly in no position to prevent their use. The reasonable-unreasonable world in which he lives does not tolerate a weaponless vacuum. Horror is inspired by the fact that people have grown accustomed to remain calm in their homes on the slopes of an active volcano. When a feast takes place during a plague epidemic, one wants to know what the future looks like not to the revellers, already hit by the epidemic, but whether any future at all is expected; as a matter of fact, even before the fatal button is pressed war will reap a bounteous harvest through fear, the burden of armaments (approximately 250 billion dollars annually on a global scale), licentiousness and the anxiety of waiting. Despite the primitive hopes of the sense of contentedness, the cold war has practically no alternative to a hot war with nuclear destruction. Catastrophe hangs overhead and it may even be touched.

p No, the future should be not awaited but feared, Nihilism asserts that only the vulgar consciousness can believe the naive assumption that in future the tragedy of individuals and entire nations will vanish, that there will be no torment of solitude and no sense of horror from the knowledge of one’s aloneness in a bleak and hostile world, that there will be no neuroses, no diseases, no fear of old age and no terror of death.

p From this standpoint the conformist sense of contentedness and the theoretical optimism that substantiates and justifies this sense are the principal threat to mankind. With this is bracketed revolutionary consciousness and the historical optimism of Marxist-Leninist theory, which is criticised 135 by prior identification with the sense of contentedness and official bourgeois optimism. They sum up the “grand total”, indicate some outwardly similar features (exactly as in the arguments about convergence) and the evidence is declared to be “irrefutable”.

p Nihilism proclaims that bourgeois (and, with it, Marxist) optimism is the most perilous intellectual chicanery, a feeble teaching devoid of virile criticism, a sure sign of complacency, credulity, naivete, modesty and banality. As nihilism sees it, this is a vicious optimism because it is unable to understand the world as it is; it is dangerous because it cannot adequately react to threats. Only a person who has lost his senses can be an optimist in this world—such is the last word of nihilism.

We have considered its favourite gripes. Without running any great risk of making a mistake one can count on meeting the same personages in all their varieties, and there are many, very many of them: demoniacal machinery, hostility for science, despotic society, the horrors of day-to-day existence, the total depravity of human nature, the barrenness of revolutionary changes, the endless suffering and the inevitability of alienation. Nihilism finds doleful aspects in any problem. In contrast to “debunked” optimism, the mediating sense of wretchedness is regarded by manipulated public opinion (and by itself) as a sign of wisdom, analytical maturity and a boundlessly broad outlook. In any case, it bears the hallmarks of circumspection devoid of hasty and disorientating predilections for rosy colours.