Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. Doris Lessing

us not split violently over points of doctrine and then start murdering each other.’ But this is exactly what happened. They were helpless in the grip of forces they themselves had helped let loose. They did not understand what was happening to them. We have more and more information that can, if we use it, help us understand what is happening to us in various situations.

      Yet everywhere, among certain kinds of persons, this great new achievement is put down. Why? I think that in this case it is more than just older generations of academics resenting new attitudes. I think that what they have been unconsciously looking for, and failing to find, are certitudes and dogmas, proven recipes that can be applied to every situation.

      People like certainties. More, they crave certainty, they seek certainty, and great resounding truths. They like to be part of some movement equipped with these truths and certainties, and if there are rebels and heretics, that is even more satisfying, because this structure is so deep in all of us.

      In Britain, a country that is rapidly being polarized into extremes (it is frightening to be a part of it) it was the miners’ strike that precipitated or made obvious a process that began, I believe, with the collapse and fragmentation of the Left. For a very long time in Britain we have had a balance of Left and Right, each side containing within itself a large range of different opinions. This balance has gone. The Left is a mass of small and large groups. This is a classical recipe for social disorder, even revolution.

      The polarization can be seen not only in politics, but in universities. A friend of mine decided to study anthropology and she found she had no alternative but to listen to Marxist lectures – lectures based on Marxist attitudes. If you say that Marxism is no longer a unity but a series of little churches, each with its own dogmas, I agree; but there are certain attitudes in common. These are again largely unconscious. Some things are not discussed, or hardly mentioned. It is possible to sit through hours, days, of discussion about war, and never hear it mentioned that one of the causes of war is that people enjoy it, or enjoy the idea of it. So it is also that one may hear, or read, interminably about the problems of the Left, and never hear it said that the reason why the Left is in such trouble is that people have seen Socialism in action in country after country and are terrified of it. The Soviet Union: a tyranny, where if you disagree you find yourself in a mental hospital, because by definition you must be mad; a country where it is reckoned twenty million people died from the excesses of Stalin. China, where between twenty and sixty million people (the figures vary according to source) were slaughtered in the Cultural Revolution and where the country’s progress was set back, according to its own estimates, by a generation. Cuba … Ethiopia … Somalia … South Yemen … I could go on, but there is no need. No need, except for people actually inside the Left. There, as always in great mass movements, reign certain sentimental certitudes that are unchallenged and undiscussed. One is that Socialists are better than nonSocialists – morally better, that is – in spite of the fact that Socialism has created the most monstrous tyrannies, has murdered millions. And still does. Another certitude is that all Capitalists are bad, mean ill to the community, are brutal and corrupt. Another, that Socialists are peaceful by nature. Another, that women are inherently more peaceable than men. History does not exactly bear this out.