Lovelessness of State, Corporation and Religion

Aldous Huxley rolls in his grave
Artwork by dregstudios

Excerpt from Aldous Huxley’s book “The Perennial Philosophy”, from the chapter “Charity”

“(...) Our present economic, social and international arrangements are based, in large measure, upon organized lovelessness. We begin by lacking charity* towards Nature, so that instead of trying to co-operate with Tao or the Logos on the inanimate and subhuman levels, we try to dominate and exploit, we waste the earth’s mineral resources, ruin it’s soil, ravage its forests, pour filth into its rivers and poisonous fumes into its air.
From lovelessness in relation to Nature we advance to lovelessness in relation to art, a lovelessness so extreme that we have effectively killed all the fundamental or useful arts and set up various kinds of mass production by machines in their place. And of course this lovelessness in regard to the human beings who have to perform the fool-proof and grace-proof tasks imposed by our mechanical art-surrogates and by the interminable paper work connected with mass production and mass distribution. With mass-production and mass-distribution go mass-financing, and the three have conspired to expropriate ever-increasing numbers of small owners of land and productive equipment, thus reducing the sum of freedom among the majority and increasing the power of a minority to exercise a coercive control over the lives of their fellows. This coercively controlling minority is composed of private capitalists or governmental bureaucrats or of both classes of bosses acting in collaboration, and, of course, the coercive and therefore essentially loveless nature of the control remains the same, whether the bosses call themselves “company directors” or “civil servants”. The only difference between these two kinds of oligarchical rulers is that the first derive more of their power from wealth than from position within a conventionally respected hierarchy, while the second derive more power from position than from wealth. Upon this fairly uniform groundwork of loveless relationships are imposed others, which vary widely from one society to another, according to local conditions and local habits of thought and feeling. Here are a few examples: contempt and exploitation of coloured minorities living among white majorities, or of coloured majorities governed by minorities of white imperialists; hatred of Jews, Catholics, Free Masons or of any other minority whose language, habits, appearance or religion happens to differ from those of the local majority. And the crowning superstructure of uncharity is the organized lovelessness of the relations between state and sovereign state, a lovelessness that expresses itself in the axiomatic assumption that it is right and natural for national organizations to behave like thieves and murderers, armed to the teeth and ready, at the first favourable opportunity, to steal and kill. (...)”

*Here Huxley refers to “charity” as an alternative to the loaded word “love”. It is meant to mean here the most pure and selfless form of love possible. A love not only in relation to those in need, but to everyone and everything including oneself, animals and the inanimate world.

On religion Huxley writes the following, in the chapter “Mortification, Non-Attachment, Right Livelihood”:

“(...) That the mortified are, in some respects, often much worse that the unmortified is a commonplace of history, fiction and descriptive psychology. Thus the Puritan may practice all the cardinal virtues, prudence, fortitude, temperance and chastity, and yet remain a thoroughly bad man; for, in all too many cases, these virtues of his are accompanied by, and indeed causally connected with, the sins of pride, envy, chronic anger and an uncharitableness pushed sometimes to the level of active cruelty. (...)

As usual, the corruption of the best is the worst. The difference between the mortified, but still proud and self-centred stoic and the unmortified hedonist consists in this: the latter, being flabby, shiftless and at heart rather ashamed of himself, lacks the energy and the motive to do much harm except to his own body, mind and spirit; the former, because he has all the secondary virtues and looks down on those who are not like himself, is morally equipped to wish and to be able to do harm on the very largest scale and with a perfectly untroubled conscience. These are obvious facts; and yet, in the current religious jargon of our day the word “immoral” is reserved exclusively for the carnally self-indulgent. The covetous and the ambitious, the respectable toughs and those who cloak their lust for power and place under the right sort of idealistic cant, are not merely unblamed; they are even held up as models of virtue and godliness. The representatives of the organized churches begin by patting haloes on the heads of the people who do most to make wars and revolutions, then go on, rather plaintively, to wonder why the world should be in such a mess. (...)”