Oldal 144 [144]
OCR
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.
