Going Home - Doris May Lessing [124]
The individual—democracy, liberty—I am concerned now with these more than with anything. One has to choose one’s battleground, limited for every one of us. The individual is threatened, now more than ever, by the increasing poverty of the world which spends money on armaments rather than development; by the mass hunger that is approaching so fast; by the wars being fought—and every time a war is fought anywhere the individuals concerned cease to matter until it is over.
The price of liberty is, more than ever, eternal vigilance, which is why I think the most valuable citizens any country can possess are the troublemakers, the public nuisances, the fighters of small, apparently unimportant battles. No government, no political party anywhere cares a damn about the individual. That is not their business. So I believe in the ginger-groups, the temporarily associated minorities, the Don Quixotes, the takers-of-stands-on-principle, the do-gooders and the defenders of lost causes. Luckily, there are plenty of them. So—to the barricades, citizens! If we don’t fight every inch of the way, we’ll find ourselves with our numbers tattooed on our wrists yet.
LONDON, May, 1967
Twenty-six Years Later
A new reprint, and I have just finished checking for errors that may have crept in. I have been forced to read, then, the record of my changes of mind about communism. Embarrassing. I would prefer not to have them exposed, because like others of my kind, the former reds, I wonder how it was possible that I held such views. I tend to minimize both what I believed then, and for how long I believed it. The fact that there were so many of us does not make things any better. I said as late as 1967 that I believed the communist countries were getting more democratic. I did? I did. How could I have conceivably believed such nonsense? How does it come about that people who are quite insightful and sensible about some aspects of politics are so silly about others? For it remains true that on the whole socialists and communists were more far-sighted about the nature of white rule than other people, no matter how wrong they were about communism. This is a paradox that continues to fascinate me. I am now particularly interested—because I know how easy it is to delude oneself when it is a question of some faith, religion, doctrine—in the research that goes on everywhere into the character and structure of mass movements, indoctrination, beliefs.
Looking back, I say to myself that ideally I would like to have been a communist for let’s say two years, because of what I learned about the nature of power, power-lovers, fanatics, the dynamics of groups and how they form and split, about one’s own capacity for self-delusion. Of course this is impossible. I am wondering if there is some psychological law that dictates the length of time it takes to recover from the effects of a submission away from commonsense, to a faith, whether political or religious. There must be stages of this, like an illness; a slow recovery from absolutism, through degrees of agnosticism. It is unfortunately true that one may be cured of a faith in communism; but scars remain, and it takes time to recognize them. The apocalyptic mode of thinking for one; the patterns of hell, purgatory, paradise, heaven; redemption and sacrifice, which originated in religion to become the structure of socialism.
I see that I described a successful revolt against white rule in Southern Rhodesia as a possibility. There has been a successful revolution, and there is a black government; so one has to examine the apparent impossibility of a revolution in South Africa with different eyes.
In the last paragraph of the 1967 afterword, I stated my preference for small ginger-groups, pressure groups, people temporarily associated for