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By Root 5397 0

of Le Corbusier-like city of the future, full of colossal concrete buildings with aeroplanes flying between them: except that he portrayed it as a dehumanised slavestate, with serried armies of regimented workers having to toil ceaselessly at machines in a 'below the line' underworld, to serve the `above the line' elite who ruled this hellish new society. Six years later Aldous Huxley delivered his own verdict on the 1920s in Brave New World, extrapolating the obsessive hedonism of those years into the basis for a future World State. Here, again in a Le Corbusierlike city of immense buildings set amid trees, the Alphas were kept by drugs in constant mindless pursuit of promiscuous self-indulgence. Again this was made possible by regimented slave-armies of Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons `below the line'. Above them all, the tiny, shadowy elite who were the real rulers of Huxley's nightmare world strove to ensure that no one should ever develop individual thoughts or feelings, because for everyone to be kept unthinkingly at one with the collective consciousness was the fundamental principle on which this totalitarian state rested.

In fact, by the time Huxley's book was published, the Dream Stage of the 1920s which inspired it had already come abruptly to an end. In November 1929 the Wall Street crash heralded the greatest economic slump in history, with tens of millions unemployed all across the Western world. Amid the gloom of the Great Depression, Fitzgerald laboured at his last complete novel, Tender is the Night, reflecting how his own 1920s euphoria had soured into a nightmare of failed dreams and alcoholic depression. Meanwhile in Russia and Germany two genuinely totalitarian systems were now in the ascendant, each in its own way darker than anything Huxley had conceived of, and which, in the years ahead, were to cast a shadow extending over the whole of mankind.

The dream of a Communist Utopia which took over Russia in 1917, as we have seen, was the most extreme expression of that collective fantasy which had begun to emerge in the minds of Marx and other early Socialists in the nineteenth century, in response to the one-sidedness of mass-industrialisation. They became gripped by the vision of the downtrodden proletariat rising up from `below the line' to sweep away all the oppressive old political and social structure, to build a perfect society in which everyone could be equal. The hypnotic appeal of this vision derived precisely from the extent to which it unconsciously drew on the power of the archetype of the Self. In claiming to act in the interests of all mankind, it tapped into that sense of moral righteousness which could be generated around the dream of building a community which transcended selfish interests, when in fact it was only expressing the collective egotism of a particular group.

Every group-fantasy - such as Communism - depends on three factors. The first is the particular dream or collective act of make-believe which binds its followers together. The second is its need for `dream heroes' who are inflated to superhuman stature because they embody and act as projections of the fantasy. The third, playing a crucial role in reinforcing the sense of collective identity of those caught up in the fantasy, as Dostoyevsky portrayed in The Possessed and as Orwell was later to show in Nineteen Eighty Four, is the need for `enemies' and `hate-figures': those outside the fantasy against whom they can work up feelings of aggression. Caricaturing the `enemies' as darkly and negatively as possible plays a key part in helping those within the fantasy to see their own role in a heroic, idealised light.

For Russia, in the years after 1917, the dream was to `construct Socialism, leading ultimately to the achievement of the perfect Communist state. The first `dream heroes' whose iconic images were soon to proliferate all over Russia were Marx and Lenin, joined in the mid-1920s by Stalin. The necessary hate-figures were all those `enemies of the revolution' who needed to be rooted out and crushed, from the