A close-knit society necessarily sets up a conflict between the interests of individuals. For the satisfaction of the desires of one group it makes injury to others necessary. Against the superiority, the advantages, the happiness of one group, it sets the inferiority, the disadvantages, the unhappiness of others. It arouses the desire for goods which cannot be achieved without injuring others, for goods consisting of injury to others, which correspond by their nature to the same number of injuries [3786] to other individuals, and of the same level, no, in the main, greater than are those goods. So a close-knit society necessarily harms a very great part (and the greater part, because the weaker are always the majority) of its individuals. Therefore its effect is the opposite to the proper and essential end of society, which is the common good of its individual members, or at least of the majority. Therefore it is the opposite of society, and is incompatible through its essence not only with nature in general, but with the nature and very notion of society.
Both the conflict of interests, and the other things outlined above, make it certain that the natural hatred of every individual toward the others, in a close-knit society, not only develops fully, and has as much effectiveness and act as it has potential, but that it necessarily ensures, against the interests of nature and the well-being of the species, that that natural hatred which in potential and in nature is much less toward its fellows than toward other living creatures, in act is much greater toward its fellows, indeed all its acts and its effects are directed against its fellows. Because the individual in a close-knit society has close daily relations and dealings with his fellows alone. Now hatred toward others cannot develop nor pass into act unless one has or has had dealings with the hated object. And it develops and operates all the more according to whether these dealings are or have been greater, and more frequent, longer, more continuous. And in conformity with these obvious principles, we see in fact that while the human individual at the beginning, both in potential and in act, hated other living creatures much more, [3787] especially those harmful toward himself, etc., now in act he hates beyond compare his fellows more than other living creatures, even those which are most deadly toward him, because he is distant from these, or can have few dealings with them, and no business of the spirit; to the former he is always present, and deals with them all the time, and has constant, extensive business with them, both in body, and, what is even more important, in spirit. For these reasons the hatred man today bears toward the most misanthropic animal you can imagine is sweetness and light compared to what he feels toward his fellows, and everyone can see how ridiculous it would be to make any comparison between them. So hatred toward others, a quality which is as natural as it is destructive of true society, in a close-knit society not only does not in any degree become less strong against its fellows than it was in nature, but on the contrary, if not in potential, certainly in act it increases a thousandfold, and in fact by actually turning away from all other living creatures, it becomes concentrated, limits itself, and turns exclusively against its fellows. For this reason if the living creature, given the hatred described, is antisocial in nature, it does not in fact become more social by virtue of the close-knit society, but infinitely more antisocial than it was at the beginning, because at the beginning it hated its fellows in a way only potentially, and in act it hated only or a great deal more other living creatures, and in a close-knit society its hatred forgets almost completely other living creatures, and in act it hates, one might say, only its fellows, and it hates them much more than it did those who were not its fellows, with whom it always had less business and intimate dealings, than it now has with its fellows.
[3788] In summary, from all these things, one draws the conclusion that the phrase close-knit society, especially close-knit human society, is a contradiction, not only with respect to nature, etc., but in absolute terms, with respect to itself, and with respect to the notion of these words. Because society has the meaning which is defined above (p. 3777), and close-knit society has the meaning of communion between individuals who mutually harm each other, and in act hate each other more than anything else, because, given the nature of living creatures, there can never be a close-knit society whose individuals do not behave in this way, as has been shown.
Therefore it is no wonder that, other than primitive and natural society, there has never been and never will be a perfect form of society, among all those which have been realized, imagined, are realizable or imaginable. Because the elements of such forms must have always been discordant, because the very idea of those forms is naturally contradictory. And it has never been possible to replace that first society, nor can it ever be replaced, because universal nature, or particular and special nature, cannot be replaced, nor can the happiness and the perfection prescribed by nature for any being or species be replaced, nor is any species or created being capable of more than one prescribed happiness and perfection, which only exists and can only have form in its natural state, nor can it derive these from elsewhere. Nor did destiny determine, nor does the nature of things allow [3789] any species or any mortal and created being to be the originator of the system and order which is to lead it to its own happiness and perfection (as would be the case if man were destined for that society which we think it is, which is capable of and has need of one form, not just realized but imagined by men, and man can receive and has received a myriad forms, all equally good and bad, all or almost all appropriate to that society and the idea of it—that is all contradictory and discordant in themselves, etc.—and nature did not nor could prescribe any form for that society, for she had not wished it, whereas she did indeed prescribe some, that were entire and constant, for those societies which she did decree, such as those of beavers, and of cranes, etc.). But solely nature itself, or we might say the Creator, must have been the author, both of each creature and of the system, order, and mode which was intended to lead it to the perfection of its existence, in other words happiness, and render His work complete.
All this reasoning rules out a close-knit society, not only from the human species, but from all living species, and all the more so—contrary to what is presumed—the more alive they are, the more self-love they have, therefore, and the more intense their passions and the greater and more intense their hatred toward others. All of which means that the above remarks rule out close-knit society, especially from the human species. Moving on now to show more closely how true it is that hatred toward others, especially toward one’s fellows, is [3790] much greater in man than in other animals, and therefore man is the most unsocial of all animals, because a close-knit society of men, to the individuals which compose it, is much more harmful than it would be in any other species, we will consider war—an absolutely inevitable evil in a close-knit society of men, and in no way accidental—with the intention of showing that even if the experience of all nations and all ages were not enough, it should be sufficient to reflect that since a close-knit society of necessity brings into act the natural hatred of individuals toward fellow individuals in the way and for the reasons explained above, it does the same between class and class, rank and rank, order and order, company and company, people and people. And as war arises inevitably in any close-knit society of whatever kind, it should be noted that there is no people so savage and so little corrupted, which once it has a society, does not have war, which is continuous and very cruel. This can be seen, to bring forward an example, in the savage nations of America, among whom there was no little village of four huts so tiny, ignorant, and poor that it was not continuously in a state of ferocious war with this or that other similar village nearby, in such a way that every now and then whole villages disappeared, and whole provinces were emptied of men by the hand of man, and immense deserts could be and still are seen by travelers, where a few traces of cultivation and of a place formerly or recently inhabited [3791] attest to the damage, the calamity, and the destruction which the natural hatred toward one’s fellows made real and effective by societ
y wreaks on the human species. See the work quoted by me on p. 3795, passim, and briefly in ch. 116.1 And certainly there is not nor has there ever been in the world a small island so tiny and remote, with so few inhabitants, and so little corrupted in its customs, where among the few dozen human inhabitants closely joined in society, there has not been nor is there division, discord and most deadly warfare, and diversity of parties and multiplicity of nations. How war between men arose and must necessarily have arisen, I have said on pp. 2677ff., where one can see that the fault of this emergence is entirely due to close-knit society, since once this was in place, the other inevitably followed. And so great is the hatred of man toward man, and so great the harm which inevitably arises from it in a close-knit society, that the division into different peoples, and the enmity between people and people, once the close-knit society is in place, is useful rather than damaging to the human race, because it keeps at a distance much more terrible and savage internecine warfare, whether it is open, as I said in the place quoted, or the covert war of egoism, which plagues all individuals in a single nation, one set through the agency of another, as I argued at length when I spoke of the utility of the love of one’s country and nation and consequently of hatred toward outsiders, and of the damage which arises from the lack of nationality and from so-called universal love, etc. [→Z 872ff.]. All of this, assuming a close-knit society, and assuming that it can no longer be avoided (as in fact it cannot).
Now the fact that the human species constantly and regularly perishes at its own hands, and that such a large part perishes in this way and in such a structured fashion as happens in war, is something on the one hand [3792] as contrary and repugnant to nature as suicide, in agreement with what was said above (p. 3784), on the other hand entirely devoid of example and analogy in any other known species, whether inanimate or animate, whether among unsociable animals or those which after man are the most sociable. That a species of things destroys and consumes another, this is the order of nature, but that any species (and especially the principal one, which is the human species) should regularly consume and destroy itself, can be as much according to nature as the fact that any individual should itself be regularly the cause and instrument of its own destruction. Dogs, bears, and similar animals very frequently contend between themselves, and they often cause hurt, but it is very rare for a beast to be killed by its fellow, and in fact they seldom suffer more than a passing and treatable injury. And when one of them is killed, this is much more commonly one of those completely chance disorders, not only not intended, but not even foreseeable by nature, and for which it has no fault, since it happens against its intentions and its provisions, which, although not in this particular case, are however in general sufficient and achieve their purpose. This case, with respect to nature and to the general order of things, as well as the general order of the species, is a chance occurrence in the same way as if an animal kills one of its fellows involuntarily, unknowingly, etc., or if it kills in the same way some animal of a different species, etc., or if it is killed by the fall of a tree, or by a bolt of lightning, or by disease, etc. etc. etc. Second, what kind of proportion, indeed what similarity can there be between the killing of one or four or ten animals by their fellows here and there at rare moments, over a long period, and driven by a momentary and overwhelming passion, and the killing of thousands of human individuals carried out in half an hour, in the same place, by other fellow individuals, in no way driven by passion, who fight for one side of a dispute which is either someone else’s, or not proper to any one of them, but common (where no [3793] animal ever fights for anything but itself; at the most, but very rarely with its fellows, for its young, which are effectively the property of the animal, indeed part of it), and who have no knowledge at all of those whom they are killing, and within a day, or within an hour, they go back to kill the same people, and continue sometimes until they have completely wiped them out, etc. etc.?1 Leaving aside the infinite number of evils and miseries which war wreaks on peoples, evils and miseries which in any case are partly real, and would be so even in the natural state of the human race (such as mutilations, etc.), and in part are as they are when men form a close-knit society, with its modes of behavior and therefore its needs (such as the devastation of fields, and the ruin of cities, and famines, as well as plagues, etc. etc.). These things must be recognized as evils especially by those who maintain that a society such as the one we have now, and such as the one which causes war, is proper to man, but also by those who although they may deny this idea, so to say, as a matter of principle have to acknowledge it, however, as a matter of fact, accepting the existence of war, etc., and therefore accepting all the modes of behavior and the needs which war cannot but produce in men, etc. Only among bees, whose society is natural, could one claim to find an example of our sort of war, carried out by several persons on each side, etc. But when one looks at it closely, even the battles of the bees, apart from being extremely rare and in no way regular and inevitable (when compared with ours), are the effect of a momentary passion, like the single combats, or little more than single, of a very disorganized and confused nature between dogs, or bears, etc., so that the bees’ battles are for one reason or another to be considered as chance disorders, [3794] as we said about those of dogs, etc. I do not think it will be possible to find any other example of fighting between two parties of the same species, other than bees, except in men, because even when other animals fight in great numbers between themselves, they fight one against another in a very confused fashion without any friend, or each against all, because each fights only for itself, driven by its own passion, and with the purpose of its own good, and not that of another nor of the common good.
To measure how much greater is man’s capacity to hate everyone, and in the context of a close-knit society, to hate his fellows, greater, I say, than that of any other species of animals, it is enough to observe the horrible and immeasurable cruelties which by his deeds man has shown himself and shows himself time and time again capable of inflicting on his fellows who are his enemies, whether they are of another nation, hostile or friendly, and in such cases inflicted by whole nations through custom or in extraordinary circumstances, or by individuals in particular, or whether they are part of the same nation and society, whatever it might be. Nor did primitive man toward other animals hostile to him, nor any animal (no matter how fierce, how unsocial), not only toward his fellows, but also toward other species more hostile to him, ever inflict (except in case of need such as feeding himself, etc., but not out of hatred, nor with the intention of tearing the other apart, even if he does tear him apart) or ever does inflict, even in the fiercest heat of anger and in the midst of combat, cruelty so great that it is worthy to be compared with those which individual humans of the same nation have inflicted and continue to inflict on their companions, nations on hostile nations, governments on their guilty or supposedly guilty subjects, tyrants, etc. etc., and they have inflicted and continue to inflict them thousands of times after victory, after danger, in cold blood, frequently without any passion at all, even passion felt in the past (as with punishments of criminals), because of [3795] custom, rule, law, tradition handed down by their elders, etc. etc. etc.
Who is unaware of the power of the spirit of revenge in man, which renders eternal the anger and hatred toward one’s fellows caused by the slightest offense, true or false, just or unjust, etc., and by other reasons which make men angry toward other men, whether among nations, or among individuals, whether private or public, etc.? Now this spirit, which is inevitable in any human close-knit society, was unknown to primitive man, and it is unknown to any other animal, in whom anger lasts no longer than any other momentary passion, and the memory of the offense lasts no longer than the anger; and revenge is either immediately obtained and carried out (and it does not take a great deal to placate and satisfy them), or afterward it is not sought for just as if the offense had not taken place.
This spirit of revenge, e
tc., and the cruelties mentioned above, etc., are so natural to man placed in a close-knit society, which develops his innate hatred toward his fellows, etc., that there is no need for much corruption to bring them about, indeed they are invariably to be found in any more primitive and childlike society. One should not miss reading on this subject, and on other most hideous practices, proper only to man against his fellows, and proper also to half-natural and almost primitive man, the Parte primera de la Chronica del Peru of Pedro Cieça de Leon (a Spanish soldier who took part in the conquest and discovery of those countries, where he lived more than seventeen years,a and he himself saw, and took part in or heard accounts of eyewitnesses and of the Indians themselves, etc., all the things, the practices, the events, the places, etc., which he relates; and he declares both in the [3796] preface and in many other places, and shows by his style of writing which is very simple and unadorned, not to say uneducated and artless, that he is telling the absolute pure truth; he also shows great judgment, except with regard to superstitions, where he demonstrates that credulity in such matters which is a feature of his nation and was a feature of his age and past ages) Antwerp, 1554, published by Juan Steelsio, printed by Juan Lacio, small 8°, chs. 12, 16 (fol. 41), 19 (fol. 49, p. 2) principally, in addition to the other places which can be found indicated in the index under the heading “Indios amigos de comer carne humana” [“Indians fond of eating human flesh”].1
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