THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 469
of champions, the purely medical recourse replaces or suppresses the recourse to the social causes of misery. The lever to improvement is here always placed as far
down, as far beneath the real man and his milieu as possible. Hence, even without a literal Malthus, the interested or at least ignorant narrow view which, from a drop of
blood as it were, sent in to the laboratory, thinks it can discern the entire sickness of mankind. The whole living sufferer is overlooked, but also particularly the
circumstances in which he finds himself. Hence the overestimation of bacilli as the sole causes of epidemics; the microbe above all concealed other attendant symptoms
of the disease, bad milieu and the like; it thus relieved people of the duty to look for the causes there as well. Consumption, for example, rages chiefly amongst the
poor, but if that were taken into account, then poverty would have to be combatted, as a particularly damp patch; for which bourgeois medicine shows less inclination.
A one­sidedly medical abortion of these ills is thus often only an intentionally or unintentionally chosen means of not having to remedy the real ills (ut aliquid fieri
videatur, as it says on false prescriptions). Thus the entire Malthusian system, even apart from the man himself and his theory, epitomizes a whole area of repression. A
mere mechanistic first­aid chest, without primacy of the social milieu and without plans to change it, without Pavlov and knowledge of the whole human being as a
creature who is cerebrally and socially controlled, — this prevents the co­operation of doctor and red flag, with the latter leading the way. The social question is solved
least of all by the poor exercising sexual self­control, we must intervene in production in a different way, and in a different production. An element of Malthus also had
an effect on Darwin, who projected overpopulation back into the animal kingdom; Soviet Darwinists have recently rid Darwinism of its Malthusian mistakes. What
remains is merely the plan for a birth control which for many people would certainly be beneficial and hence progressive. Namely as long as there is a capitalist society,
and life within it is so precarious that such a society needs this kind of limitation or abortion. As long as it remains in the state it is in today: namely that of no longer
being able to feed its slaves. The earth has room for everyone, or it would have, if it were run by the power of satisfying people's needs instead of by satisfying the
needs of power.
The doctor's care
Only then would the doctor's work really make a clean start. The doctor