ENDS AND MEANS
squalid little self. As they do not know how to travel
upwards from personality into a region of super-personality
and as they are unwilling, even if they do know, to fulfil
the ethical, psychological and physiological conditions of
self-transcendence, they turn naturally to the descending
road, the road that leads down from personality to the
darkness of sub-human emotionalism and panic'animality.
Hence the persistent craving for narcotics and stimulants,
hence the never-failing attraction of tie crowd. The suc-
cess of the dictators is due in large measure to their extremely
skilful exploitation of the universal human need for escape
from the limitations of personality. Perceiving that people
wished to take holidays from themselves in sub-human
emotionality, they have systematically provided their sub-
jects with the occasions for doing so. The Communists
denounce religion as the opium of the people; but all they
have done is to replace this old drug by a new one of similar
composition. For the crowd around the relic of the saint
they have substituted the crowd at the political meeting;
for religious procession, military reviews and May Day
parades. It is the same with the Fascist dictators. In all
the totalitarian states the masses are persuaded, and even
compelled, to take periodical holidays from themselves in
the sub-humah world of crowd emotion. It is significant
that while they encourage and actually command the descent
into sub-humanity, the dictators do all they can .to prevent
men from taking the upward road from personal limitation,"
the road that leads towards non-attachment to the * things of
this world' and attachment to that which is super-personal.
The higher manifestations of religion are far more suspect
to the tyrants than the lower—and with reason. For the
man who escapes from egotism into super-personality has
transcended his old idolatrous loyalty, not only to himself,"
•but also to the local divinities—nation, party, class, deified
boss. Self-transcendence, escape from the prison of the