16 Living in Revolution
until their youth became cynical. Then began the fanatical
belief in their own crowd and their own leader, as though
they were the only good fruit on earth and all the rest were
but rotten apples. But when that fanaticism fails, it is not
like defeated justice which is still justice, nor like a denied
fact which is still fact. Disillusioned fanaticism of the mod-
ern sort turns into nothingness, where cynicism begins again.
This is a vicious circle that brings all fanaticism back to the
doubts where it began.
In their aggressive and successful stage fanatics are in-
clined to abandon all morals and go over to nihilism. We
all like a little nihilism when it suits our purpose. The
adolescent, revolting from the customs of some stodgy or
stagnant respectability and going forth to sow wild oats, is
a budding nihilist on the loose. Without some such break
from goodness that wants to stand still, we would still be
caught in the sins of our ancestors and final dullness. But
since the last war we have learned what a general loose-
ness could mean. Scrapping the Ten Commandments be-
came the vogue. It was like the soldier who, after listening
to a chaplain’s talk on the Commandments, pulled himself
together saying: “Anyway, I never made a graven image.”
It took the modern revolutionists, however, to draw the
full conclusions of nihilism. Seeing all the dirty work of
self-interest concealed behind a respectable and even Chris-
tian front, they came into the open to do the dirty work with-
out embarrassment. Seventy-five years ago in Russia Dos-
toievsky saw this coming and warned us by the extraordi-
nary characters in his books, who today are in the flesh. His
man from the “underworld” says: “I shall not be a bit sur-
prised if, in the midst of universal reason, there will appear
all of a sudden some common man, a rather cynical and
sneering gentleman who, with his arms akimbo, will say:
‘Now then, you fellows, what about smashing all this
reason to bits—and living as we like according to our own