The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (30 page)

“Yes, I remember.”

“And do you remember how I told you that I would later resolve them definitively, through logic, once I’d fully grasped the true anarchist method?”

“Yes.”

“Well now you’ll see what I meant.... The problems were, firstly, that it’s not
natural
to work for some entity or cause, no matter what it is, without a
natural
, or selfish, reward; and, secondly, that it’s not
natural
to devote our efforts to some goal without the compensation of knowing that the goal will be achieved. Those were the two problems; observe how they were resolved by what my reason discovered to be the only true method of anarchist action.... Since the method results in my getting rich,
there is a selfish reward
. And since I free myself from money, becoming superior to its power,
I achieve the method’s goal, which is freedom
. It’s true that I achieve freedom only for myself, but as I’ve already proven, freedom for everyone will be achieved only when all social fictions are destroyed by the social revolution, which I can’t bring about on my own. The point that matters is this: I strive for freedom and I achieve freedom. I achieve the freedom I’m capable of, since I obviously can’t achieve a freedom I’m not capable of.... And note that, if reason shows this to be the only true anarchist method, the fact that it automatically resolves the logical arguments that might be raised against any anarchist method is yet a further proof of its truth.

“So that’s the method I followed. I set out to subdue the fiction of money by getting rich, and I succeeded. It took time, for the struggle wasn’t easy, but I did it. I won’t go into my banking and business life,
certain details of which you might find interesting, but it’s beside the point. I worked, struggled, and made money; I worked harder, struggled harder, and made more money. I ended up making a lot of money. I didn’t think about the means I used; I confess, my friend, that I didn’t think about the means. I resorted to all means available: profiteering, financial finagling, and even unfair competition. And why not? I was fighting inexcusably immoral and unnatural social fictions, so why did I need to worry about the means? I was striving for freedom, so why worry about the weapons I used to fight tyranny? The stupid anarchist, who tosses bombs and fires guns, knows perfectly well that he kills people and that his doctrines do not include the death penalty. He commits a crime to attack immorality, for he feels that the destruction of that immorality justifies the crime. He is stupid in his method, which
as an anarchist method
is counterproductive, and thus erroneous, as I’ve shown, but with respect to the
morality
of his method he is intelligent. My method, on the other hand, was correct, and I legitimately availed myself, as an anarchist, of all possible means to get rich. I have achieved my limited dream as a practical, clear-thinking anarchist. I’m free. I do what I want—to the extent, of course, that what I want is possible. My anarchist watchword was freedom, and today I have freedom—as much freedom as it’s possible to have in our imperfect society. I set out to fight social forces; I fought them and, what’s more, defeated them.”

“Hold on right there!” I said. “This is all fine and good, except for one thing. The necessary conditions of your method were, as you demonstrated, to create freedom and
not to create
tyranny. But you have created tyranny. As a profiteer, a banker, and an unscrupulous financier—excuse me, but you yourself said as much—you have created tyranny. You have created as much tyranny as any other representative of the social fictions you claim to oppose.”

“No, my friend, you’re mistaken. I’ve
created
no tyranny. Whatever tyranny may have resulted from my struggle against social fictions didn’t originate in me, and so it isn’t my creation.
The tyranny resides in social fictions; I didn’t add it to them
. It belongs to the social fictions themselves, which I couldn’t destroy, nor did I attempt to. For the hundredth time: only the social revolution can
destroy
social fictions; until
then, all true anarchist action—such as my own—can do no more than subdue social fictions, and only in relation to the anarchist who puts this method into practice, for the method doesn’t allow for a more widespread subjection of those fictions. What’s at issue isn’t the creation of tyranny but the creation of
new
tyranny—tyranny
where there was none
before. Anarchists, when they work together and exert influence on each other, create a tyranny among themselves that’s above and beyond the tyranny of social fictions, as I explained earlier.
That
tyranny is indeed a new tyranny. I,
by the very conditions of my method
, did not and could not create such a tyranny. No, my friend; I created only freedom. I freed
one man
. I freed myself. My method, which I’ve shown to be the only true anarchist method, did not enable me to free anyone else. I freed the man I could.”

“All right. ... I agree. ... But by your line of reasoning, one could almost believe that no representative of social fictions exercises tyranny.”

“And no representative does. The tyranny belongs to social fictions and not to the people who embody them. Such people are, as it were, the
instruments
by which those fictions exercise tyranny, as the knife is the instrument by which the murderer kills. And you surely don’t imagine that by eliminating knives you will eliminate murderers.... Suppose you destroyed all the capitalists in the world, but without destroying capital.... On the very next day, capital would be in the hands of other people, through whom it would continue its tyranny. But if you destroy capital instead of capitalists, how many capitalists will be left? . .. Do you see? . ..”

“Yes, you’re right.”

“The most—the very most—you can accuse me of doing is increasing slightly—ever so slightly—the tyranny of social fictions. But the basis of the charge is flimsy, because what I must not create, and in fact didn’t create, is any
new
tyranny, as I’ve already explained. Not only that: by the same rationale you could accuse a general engaged in a war for his country of inflicting on that country the loss of its men whom he had to sacrifice in battle to defeat the enemy. No matter what the war, you win some and you lose some. What counts is the main goal; the rest....”

“Fair enough.... But there’s something else.... The true anarchist wants freedom not only for himself, but for others. He wants freedom, as I see it, for all of humanity....”

“Of course. But as I’ve already explained, according to the anarchist method that I discovered to be the only viable one, each man must free himself. By achieving my own freedom, I did my duty with respect to myself and with respect to freedom. If my comrades did not do likewise, it’s not because I prevented them. That indeed would have been a crime, but I never concealed from them the true anarchist method; as soon as I discovered it, I told them all about it. The nature of the method prohibited me from doing more than that. What more could I have done? Force them to follow this path? Even if that were possible, I wouldn’t do it, for I would be depriving them of their freedom, which is against my anarchist principles. Help them? That was also out of the question, and for the same reason. I’ve never helped others, for that would infringe on their freedom, which is likewise against my principles. What you’re blaming me for is that I’m not more than one person. Why criticize me for doing my duty of freeing as many people as I could? Why not criticize those who didn’t do their duty?”

“I take your point. But if those other anarchists didn’t do what you did, it’s because they were less intelligent than you, or less strong willed, or—”

“Ah, my friend, but those are natural inequalities, not social ones, and anarchism can do nothing about them. The degree of a person’s intelligence and willpower is a matter between him and Nature; social fictions don’t enter in at all. There are, as I’ve mentioned, natural qualities that have no doubt been perverted by humanity’s long exposure to social fictions, but the perversion is in the
application
of the quality, not in its
degree
, which depends exclusively on Nature. Lack of intelligence or willpower has nothing to do with the application of these qualities; it has to do with their insufficient quantity. That’s why I say that these are natural inequalities, over which no one has any power, nor can they be changed by changes in society, any more than such changes could make me tall or you short....

“Unless ... unless the hereditary perversion of natural qualities goes so far as to affect the very core of certain people’s personalities..., making them born slaves, naturally born to be slaves, and therefore incapable of making any effort to free themselves.... But in that case ... in that case ..., what do they have to do with the free society, or with freedom? ... For a man born to be a slave, freedom would be a tyranny, since it would go against his very nature.”

There was a brief pause. Then I broke out laughing.

“You really are an anarchist,” I said. “But even after hearing you out, I still can’t help but laugh when I think about what you are in comparison with other anarchists....”

“As I’ve already explained and proven, my friend, the only real difference is that they are anarchists in theory, while I’m one in theory and practice; they are mystical anarchists, while I’m a scientific one; they are anarchists who cringe, while I’m an anarchist who fights and achieves freedom.... They, in a word, are pseudoanarchists, while I am a genuine one.”

And we stood up from the table.

Lisbon, January 1922

Pessoa wrote three prose fragments—all of them in English—on the subject of millionaires. Though the fragments have different titles, Pessoa probably intended to join them into a single essay. The longest of the three pieces, titled “Message to Millionaires,” chastises the rich for not knowing how to spend their money and enjoy life. “How many of you have a harem, a real harem?” asks Pessoa at a certain point, contending that “that would be an interesting application of wealth.” For those who wish to spend their millions charitably, Pessoa’s “message” is that they should “endow individuals, not communities,” since all that will endure “of this noisy age is some poet now obscure and crushed down by coteries and cliques, some painter who cannot sell his pictures, some musician who shall never hear an orchestra play his compositions.” Excerpts from the other two fragments follow
.

No man ever became a millionaire by hard work or cleverness. At the worst he became so by a vast and imaginative unscrupulousness; at the best by happy intuition in speculative circumstances. If any man pretend that hard thinking and a strong will have led him to make a vast fortune, then that man lies. He may have thought hard, but in such an advantageous position for thinking that his hard thinking could catch a [lucky] chance by the hair. It is always a question of lottery tickets, though perhaps of having saved enough to buy them; from the lottery ticket onwards, however, the fortune was Fate’s doing.

The proof of the fundamental stupidity of these mercenaries of Fate is the things they do with the money they accumulate. Most of them go on accumulating it and no more. Others have no more imaginative impetus than endowing hospitals or creating “foundations”—that is to say, things only to be built upon and covered and sunk in the earth—and free libraries, or even sports grounds. If these men had been imaginative, they would carry out great plans: gigantic continental sins, prodigious extravagances of building and excavating, romantic wars of oppression or liberation. But they never rise to the level of the popular novelist: they are always and irremediably Rockefellerish. Mr. Ford seems or seemed somewhat broader, but, after all, he has dared but to believe in reincarnation,* which costs him nothing.

...

One thing they never endow: they never endow the individual, which is the only true reality in the substance of the social world. They fear, by instinct, the man who deserves, and have in their hearts an obscure terror of any justice being done. They realize that if justice had been done, they would have been done in.*

No self-made millionaire—meaning a man who has been made a millionaire by circumstances—ever helped a man to find the greatness he might deserve.

...

You are so complete a zoology of beasts that the gorge refuses to rise at you, out of direct organic contempt. You stink physically to the intellect. Your very philanthropy is an insult to those whom you turn over to, in checks, the leavings of the luck you have had. Your interest in culture is the dessert of your meanness. You drink un-Portuguese port and it gets into what is where your head ought to be, and the margin fades.

...

No shred of decency, no sense of fellow-feeling with the warm commonness of mankind, nothing, nothing, nothing, save the hoard, the meanness, and the common end.

If you want European thanks, here they are. Take them and be damned to you!

You have dared to use the words of Indian mystics and European occultists toward the furthering of your publicity. You have affected a belief in reincarnation* out of a real belief in advertising. Everything your kind touches it pollutes, and the doctrine which leads the Indian mystic not to kill a fly leads you not to let men live.

I have now sufficient celebrity to talk to you, not indeed as man to man, but as man to beast. We will have it out now, as between European and low American, as between Christian and engineering heathen......

No age ever passes on to the next its sensibility, just the intellectual understanding it had of that sensibility. Emotion makes us what we are; intelligence makes us different. Intelligence spreads and scatters us, and it’s through this scattering that we survive. Every age leaves to future ages only what it wasn’t.