Michael Moorcock

It remained difficult for me to understand how some people are simply born mentally deformed, lacking all the natural moral restraints and imagination which dictate the actions of most of us, however partially. Such creatures have learned from childhood to ape the appropriate sentiments when it suits them, to charm or bully their opponents, to agree to anything, to tell any lie and to pursue their own ends with implacable determination.

“Such men and women are the true aliens amongst you and it is ironic how frequently we come to rule you. We use your very best instincts and deepest emotions against you. We convince you that we alone can satisfy your need for security and comfort and then we drain you dry of everything save perpetual terror. Ha, ha, ha!”

Light suddenly caught the steel of his helmet and made it burn like the face of some mighty fallen angel. It could have been the face of Lucifer himself. I felt then that he was perfectly capable of destroying the whole world without a shred of remorse if he believed that he could not, himself, go on living. Such creatures, I remember thinking, have always dwelt among us. They would reduce the multiverse to ash, if they could. Why, I agonized, can we not recognize them and stop them before they achieve so much power? A tiny part of the human race was responsible for the misery of the majority.

I thought again of the injustices which we ourselves casually perpetrated and I wondered how we should ever set anything to rights while we continued to allow such vast discrepancy, so much at odds with the religious and political principles we claim as our daily guides.

An unquestioned creed is a noose about the throat of Reason.

It’s in the nature of a good despot to say anything that will convince someone to do as he wishes. Only when he does not need them does he really say what he thinks. And by that time, of course, because he has no need of them, they are usually as good as dead. The secret of becoming a successful tyrant lies in an early ability to be all things to all people.

“You were both catalysts,” Mrs Persson told me, “no more than that. Do you still not realize your error? No individual can claim so much personal guilt. It is madness to do so. We are all guilty of supporting the circumstances, the self-deceptions, the misconceptions and misinformation which lead to War. Every lie we tell ourselves brings an evil like the destruction of Hiroshima closer. We drown in our lies.”

Violence creates nothing but violence, no matter what we call it and what the excuse. And so it goes, down all the centuries.

Once rich, moreover, I should again travel easily about Europe, for while in the public eye a poor radical is dangerous rogue, a rich radical is merely an eccentric gentleman!

I had sampled several such brotherhoods, including the Rosey Cross and the Orange Lodge, during the period in which I examined the Supernatural and found it not merely uninstructive but damnably dull, its members possessing nothing in the way of individual imagination and a great need to seek confirmation in numbers for the merits of miserable little madnesses....Such people as a rule were lonely, confounded misfits, attempting to alter the surrounding evidence of Nature by inventing abstractions to explain why common facts were false and ordinary reality a poor illusion.

I knew that it was human nature which lay at the root of History and that no matter where I found myself I was bound to discover superficial similarities expressing and exemplifying that nature. It was human idealism and human impatience and human despair which continued to produce these terrible wars. Human virtues and vices, mixed and confused in individuals, created what we called “History”. Yet I could see no way in which the vicious circle of aspiration and desperation might ever be broken. We were all victims of our own imagination.

But we are all victims, Captain Bastable, just as in other ways we are all aggressors. At root we are victims to the comforting lies we tell ourselves, of our willingness to shift moral responsibility onto leaders, organized religion—onto a deity or a race, if all else fails. Onto God, onto politicians, onto creatures from other planets. It is always the same impulse, to refuse responsibility. If we do not take responsibility for our own actions, ultimately we perish.

“Are you trying to talk peace terms?”

“I’ve given that up,” said Makhno. “It doesn’t appear to work. You mention peace and everyone tries to shoot you or jail you.”

“We are all guilty,” he said. “We are all innocent. Only when we accept responsibility for our own actions do we become free. And only when every one of us accepts their share of responsibility will the world become safe for us all.”