This is what the parasite has always done in the world of creators—but then he passed the buck to the creators and was able to ride along safely on their energy, on their performance and production. But now he passes the buck to another parasite—and is aghast to find that it won’t work. The parasite merely repeats the top parasite’s gesture, passing the buck further down. (But there is now no man to stop this chain—to take responsibility and action.)
When this starts with the head of a firm, it spreads on down, in ever widening circles. First, because this is the type of men the parasite would surround himself with, particularly in top positions; he’s fired and rejected the creators long ago, the creators “don’t belong, they’re inharmonious, they’re difficult.” Second, because the lesser employees (who are actually better men—honest average men—working under the orders of their inferiors, bewildered and embittered under the command of presumptuous, pompous phonies) realize what is expected of them and what is the only way to keep the job they need. They see that the bosses neither want nor understand an actual performance, but are scrambling with one another for the better position from which to fake a performance; they realize that if they attempt to do good honest work it would mean being tagged with the responsibility for somebody else’s mistake (and these mistakes are constant, all around them, they see the all-pervading reign of the
mindless);
so they conclude, in excusable self-preservation, that the safe, practical thing to do is not to work, but to fake a show of working and play the game of passing the buck.
(This is excusable for honest average men because they are not creators or initiators, they cannot go into business, start an enterprise, make a living on their own, and they never pretended they could. And it’s not possible in their collectivized, frozen, regimented world. They are, by nature, only good employees, and they have no other place to go; the situation, methods, and policy are the same in every enterprise run by the parasites. This is the point at which average men are forced to discard their best and exist by means of their worst—in a society of parasites.)
So these lesser employees start passing the buck to still smaller ones, until only the office boy is certain of his proper job and is performing it (he has no one smaller to use as a front). Then, in a crisis, it is the office boy who gets blamed for the company’s ten-million-dollar failure—and it’s all proved, explained, alibied, stated in the press, by everybody down the line, in the language of parasites to parasites, in the disgusting, deliberately inexact double-talk that passes for convincing argument. (But then, nobody is convinced of anything anyway, one way or the other, and nobody argues; the explanation, too, is only a show.)
And don’t we see
this
today!
This
is the exploitation of the weak by the strong—when strength is [based] not on the intellect, but on plain force; the parasites hold their jobs by compulsion or fraud, not by merit.
(The pretense of an explanation in this case is only a routine remembered from the world of the creators, performed but no longer understood or taken seriously. This is one example of the sickening way in which remnants of a rational world still persist in this insane asylum, in the shape of meaningless hulks, automatic routines gone through for no particular reason, just because no one took the initiative to stop it. It is the letter without the spirit, something like the maintenance of an airport for which there are no longer any planes (they do that, too). There must be many examples of this in the story—in their business and personal lives.)
The third stage is when nobody wants a position of responsibility any longer. Nobody wants a top job. The desperate competition is for
small
jobs, the smaller the safer; it is a scramble for anonymity in a world aimed at and geared to anonymity, the world without a
person,
without identity, without individuality. It has now become dangerous to be important, even important only in show, even to be only an inflated windbag or figurehead. They don’t liquidate “the specialists,” as in Russia, but the public figures; the big-shot figureheads are beginning to be blamed for the accelerating failures and disasters, for the state of the world (even if no specific personal responsibility can be pinned on any one of them). The big shots
collectively
(didn’t they want that?) are beginning to be tagged with a collective blame, there are cries of:
“Something has to be done.
” (Nobody knows what to do—everybody knows that it
has to be done.)
There have been a few cases when top parasites got caught in their own stupidities and criminal negligences, when they weren’t able to wriggle out of the responsibility, and were publicly exposed and disgraced, and lost their fortunes, factories, or positions. This has scared the rest of the top parasites. So now there are gaping vacancies in top jobs; the parasites are afraid to take them, the honest average men won’t take them, because they know that the job is hopeless, no honest work can be done in this kind of world, particularly not in any responsible executive position. The rules and regulations, which the parasites erected earlier for their own “protection,” are now such that no one can untangle them or make a step, or know where he stands—and an honest man cannot accept responsibility when he knows he won’t be left free to perform the work for which he is responsible. (Nor will he allow himself to be held responsible for the actions and mistakes of others, whom he can’t control, who control him; a slave or a robot cannot be responsible.)
And, of course, the creators are not there to take these top jobs. (They wouldn‘t, in these conditions, even without a strike—as we see today. It’s strange that Soviet Russia has such trouble getting experts and top executives, isn’t it?) At this point in the story there must be some important desertions of the few remaining creators to the ranks of the strikers—with disastrous results for the parasites left behind, causing the beginning of the parasites’ panic.
The performance of the “authorities” and celebrities begins to be grotesquely ludicrous during this period (which is just a little worse than it is right now). Authorities are picked by mere chance and sheer accident. At first, the parasites were pushing themselves and their friends into celebrity [status]; now they are afraid of it. So the field of fame is open to anyone and everyone, by blind chance; fame without any cause, achievement, or reason (merely because people have to talk about somebody, so somebody’s got to be a celebrity). This is fame by default—and another remnant of a better world, the remnant of the conception of greatness, without content. (Something like the way books become best-sellers now, practically without merit, by sheer accident; something’s got to sell, one is no better and no worse than another, it actually makes no difference, nobody really cares.)
So any adventurer, ambitious empty-headed bitch, or naive second-hander can leap (or stumble accidentally) into the class of celebrity. Then he or she becomes an “authority”—and people grasp avidly at their opinions or advice, for guidance, never questioning what is said or why the celebrity became a celebrity or whether there is any reason to respect his opinion. The chance remark of almost anybody can convince people that almost anybody else is a reliable authority. Nobody questions who made the first remark nor who started the “authority run.” People really don’t want to question
that;
it is so much safer to believe that you’re dealing with an expert and not to look into his [qualifications] too closely; everybody is eager to rest on somebody else’s assertion and to think that the somebody else knew what he was talking about, since no person knows that in regard to his own talk. The pattern is: “Why, sure, Joe Blow is the greatest expert on economics—John Doakes said so and John must have his reasons—so I don’t have to look into the reasons, it’s perfectly safe to follow the advice of Joe Blow.”
This is another example of evasion—and another distorted remnant of a better world: the realization that there are such things as experts, that they must be individuals, not a nameless collective, since any judgment can proceed only from
a mind,
and an expert is a man with trained, self-confident judgment, who knows first-hand what he is talking about. That much of a form is left in people’s minds, but an empty form, without content, with no realization of what specifically constitutes an expert on how to recognize him, so that the public attitude is a desperate search for a leader, without any understanding of what he must be or where or how he must lead them. The blind search for a great individual in a world that has discarded the concepts of individualism and greatness. And of the whole crazed herd, the celebrities and authorities are, at this point, the most frightened ones of all.
At this stage, the awful staleness of society is becoming apparent and unbearable to all; this is when they go in for revivals of the past (like the theater now), because nothing new is being produced.
The [fourth] stage is the hysterical compromise, in a growing panic. The parasite begins to see that his principles won’t work—but he can’t abandon them. He needs the creators—and he can’t admit that he needs them. He can’t do the work, but it’s got to be done—so he wants somebody who’ll do it
for him.
He proceeds in his usual twisted, irrational way—his halfway. He wants creators without having to call them creators or give them the conditions they require in order to function. He wants creators as tools—a contradiction in terms; but he thinks it’s only a matter of finding some who are
willing
to be tools.
He embarks upon a course compounded of flattery and insults, bribery and threats, incentives and [punishments], all at the same time. He attempts to develop experts and leaders, but to keep them in check, safely harnessed. He fosters a kind of “home-grown substitute for creators,” a kind of “ersatz creators.” He features individuals too much, offers exorbitant rewards (usually material), names movements and public monuments after them—yet sits guard over them, fiercely and jealously, to see that the “leader” has the proper collectivist spirit, the proper humility, no independence, not too much initiative that could flame into a rebellion; in other words, he wants the performance of a creator with the soul of a parasite, a timid, cowardly soul like his own, a soul that won’t demand too much nor develop an actual ego. He wants these alleged creators to function, yet “be kept in their place.” And all the rewards and incentives he offers are of a blatantly collectivist, second-handed nature (money, titles, public honors)—he could not venture to offer
personal
rewards, such as freedom, choice, actual authority and responsibility.
Under these conditions, one can imagine what kind of leaders he gets. Those who swim to the top now, those boosted into leadership, are the criminal element—the type of Soviet commissars or G.P.U. agents, the real gangster type, without even the saving grace of a neurosis (if that’s a saving grace). These new figures are the reemergence of the savage, the harbingers and symbols of the final retrogression. They have no scruples, principles, or anti-individualist complex; they don’t even have a conception of what any of that means; they don’t mind carrying out the orders of the parasite and they don’t care about his reasons or motives; they know they are not actually carrying out anyone’s orders—they are there to loot. They are beasts of prey in the simplest and lowest sense of the word. They are the savages who have no other conception of existence except to grab what they can, where they can, at and for the moment—the exponents of man without a mind, trying to exist through naked brute force.
[This type is represented in the novel by the character of Cuffy Meigs.
]
Their relation to the parasite, who is their official boss and who is now mere window dressing in public top positions of alleged authority, is that of G.P.U. agents to [Communist] Party theoreticians; public strutting and abject fear on the side of the latter, a silent leering contempt on the side of the former; both know who is doing whose dirty work and who is the real boss. (Or, somewhat, the relation of Toohey and Gus Webb.)
And whenever (not often) one of these new leaders turns out to be more naive or a better man than the rest of them, whenever he shows signs of something like real ability, sincerity or popularity, he is promptly liquidated by the parasite. The vicious paradox of the parasite’s position is that he must destroy the man who could possibly save him, the moment that man shows signs of such a possibility—and he must leave the field clear to those who are [his own] real destroyers. In an unstated, unadmitted way, the parasite knows this. This is one of the reasons for his growing hysteria, his panic, and his desperate attempts to escape from any thought, from facing any facts. (There must be a concrete incident and relationship like that for James Taggart and some of his last employees.)
Men like these new leaders, with no force to oppose them, would destroy the world quickly, in any stage, at any time. But when it is attempted to have them run the remnants of an industrial civilization, the end comes that much quicker. So this stage does not last long. It is merely a period of accelerated disintegration and destruction.
The [fifth] and final stage is the abject surrender to the creators—without an honest admission or realization of it. The parasite who admits or realizes anything ceases being a parasite. By now, he is not capable of that, if he ever was. But the surrender is there, and the parasite knows it, and his panic at this stage is sheer running from himself, the screaming panic within. The surrender is in the attempts to find Galt, to beg him for help, then to torture him—torture being the last and only resort of the parasite’s method: brute force, man expected to act without mind, with pain as sole impetus and motivation. This is the climax, the revelation, the parasite showing his trump card, the thing he has been holding in reserve all this time, his claim upon the
world-this
is the symbol of what he has considered as the source of his right to loot, exploit, rule and devastate the world all these centuries—
this
is his badge, his banner, his essence: torture.