My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleybeauty which inspires, but the hard fact is that many practical problems and menacingdangers must first be faced and overcome.The thesis of higher forms was preceded by a fundamental challenge to the widelyaccepted claim of the communists that history is on their side. On the contrary, theyare permanent prisoners of a transient phase in the human advance which modernscience has rendered entirely obsolete. Not only is the primitive brutality of theirmethod only possible in a backward country, but their whole thinking is onlyapplicable to a primitive community. Both their economic thinking and theirmaterialist conception of history belong exclusively to the nineteenth century. Thisthinking, still imprisoned in a temporary limitation, we challenge with thinkingderived from the whole of European history and from the yet longer trend revealed bymodern science. We challenge the idea of the nineteenth century with the idea of thetwentieth century.Communism is still held fast by the long obsolete doctrine of its origin, preciselybecause it is a material creed which recognises nothing beyond such motives and theurge to satisfy such needs. Yet modern man has surpassed that condition as surely asthe jet aircraft in action has overcome the natural law of gravity which Newtondiscovered. The same urge of man's spiritual nature served by his continuallydeveloping science can inspire him to ever greater achievement and raise him to everfurther heights.The challenge to communist materialism was stated as follows in Europe: Faith andPlan: 'What then, is the purpose of it all? Is it just material achievement? Will thewhole urge be satisfied when everyone has plenty to eat and drink, every possibleassurance against sickness and old age, a house, a television set, and a long seasideholiday each year? What other end can a communist civilisation hold in prospectexcept this, which modern science can so easily satisfy within the next few years? Ifyou begin with the belief that all history can be interpreted only in material terms, andthat any spiritual purpose is a trick and a delusion, which has the simple object ofdistracting the workers from their material aim of improving their conditions—theonly reality—what end can there be even after every conceivable success, except thesatisfaction of further material desires? When all the basic needs and wants are satedby the output of the new science, what further aim can there be but the devising ofever more fantastic amusements to titillate material appetites? If Soviet civilisationachieves its furthest ambitions, is the end to be sputnik races round the stars to relievethe tedium of being a communist?'Communism is a limited creed, and its limitations are inevitable. If the originalimpulse is envy, malice, and hatred against someone who has something you have notgot, you are inevitably limited by the whole impulse to which you owe the origin ofyour faith and movement. That initial emotion may be well founded, may be based onjustice, on indignation against the vile treatment of the workers in the early days ofthe industrial revolution. But if you hold that creed, you carry within yourself yourown prison walls, because any escape from that origin seems to lead towards thehated shape of the man who once had something you had not got; anything above orbeyond yourself is bad. In reality, he may be far from being a higher form; he may bea most decadent product of an easy living which he was incapable of using even forself-development, an ignoble example of missed opportunity. But if the first impulse420 of 424