The Art of Being Ruled

Wyndham Lewis' scathing critique of modern democracy and mass society, now back in print. "The working of the 'democratic' electoral system is of course as follows. A person is trained up stringently to certain opinions; then he is given a vote, called a 'free' and fully enfranchised person; then he votes (subject, of course, to new and stringent orders from the press, where occasionally his mentor commands him to vote contrary to what he has been taught) strictly in accordance with his training. His support for everything that he has been taught to support can be practically guaranteed. Hence, of course, the vote of the free citizen is a farce: education and suggestion, the imposition of the will of the ruler through the press and other publicity channels, cancelling it. So 'democratic' government is far more effective than subjugation by physical conquest." - Part IV, Chapter 2: The Democratic Educationalist State "a genuinely extraordinary book, because he predicted many things which were from so far off the agenda then that very few people had thought of them, and indeed this book was regarded as slightly madcap even in its era. It looks at theories through Georges Sorel, it looks at theories through Charles Maurras, but in the end it's Lewis' thesis that ultimately in the West-if we don't watch it ...-we will have Left-wing capitalism. This was a heterodox and absurdist thesis in the 1920s, which partly sophisticated Marxian critics and so on laughed to scorn! But we have all around us a global, itemized, Left-leaning capitalist order." - Jonathan Bowden