Oldal 144 [144]
142 | THe Putosopuy or Eco-PoLirics
contact) from the list of fundamental principles upholding the political
community. It experimented with technologies of organising society,
which promised to provide the optimal distribution and maximally
efficient application of the means of power, in the hope that these would
be capable of maintaining successful cooperation, independently of the
good or bad behaviour of individuals. The introduction of these
technologies, like all technological systems, requires the total conformity
of the participants and demands the application of various forms of
compulsion — whether brutal or refined, direct or indirect — against those
who refuse. ‘This could only lead to the legalisation of the superiority of
force that had been converted into power in one way or another, despite
the seeming impartiality of the rules of the game. ‘The greater this power
is, the more unshakable it makes the rule of those who wield it and the
more hopeless the situation of those who attempt to oppose them.
Currently, this applies just as much to the power of the Islamic
fundamentalists or the Chinese or Russian tyrants as to that of the
multinational business networks. It may already be too late for humanity
to change this situation, which has placed its fate in the hands of a few
thousand vastly rich people and their experts, computer scientists and
mercenaries armed to the teeth. The coherent lie, Weil would say, has
triumphed over the incoherent one.
But she herself did not give in to despair. “Where force is absolutely
sovereign, justice is absolutely unreal. Yet justice cannot be that. We know it
experimentally. It is real enough in the hearts of men. The structure of a
human heart is just as much of a reality as any other in this universe...”, she
writes in 1943, with the certainty of saints and madmen." It is not as
though she were deluding herself — at least not regarding the benevolence
of the human heart. (She speaks of the structure of the heart and not
the heart, because she was convinced that it is not the personal in us
that is worthy of respect, but the possibility we all have of rising up to
that which is above it.) She knows that the suffering endured and the
fear of what is to come has left little goodwill in people and even less
willingness to make sacrifices for each other. They do not want justice,
but rather the power to be unjust. Thus, freedom in itself, i.e., the
association of autonomous individuals without rule or hierarchy is
unlikely to create a good or even tolerable society, admits the former
anarchist fighter. ‘4s it cannot be expected that a man without grace should
be just, there must be a society organized in such a way that injustices punish
134 Thid. p.237.