The Humanisphere

by Brian Stableford

  Several times a week there is a spectacle at the theater. Lyrical works, dramas and comedies are performed there, but all very different from the poverties presented on the stage in our day. There is, in magnificent language, a critique of tendencies to immobilization, an aspiration toward the ideal future.

  There is also a gymnasium where feats of strength and agility are attempted; the arena where riders of both sexes compete in grace, vigor and excellence in guiding, standing on their rumps, the horses and lions bounding round the circuit; the rifle and pistol shooting-ranges; and the rooms where players of billiards or other games exercise their skills.

  If the weather is good there are also walks in the splendidly illuminated park; concerts under the stars, rural amusements, distant excursions into the countryside through the solitary forests, plains and mountains, where one encounters at measured intervals grottos and chalets where one can refresh oneself and have a snack. Aerial vessels or railways carriages carry swarms of excursionists wherever their caprice takes them.

  At the end of the day, everyone returns home, some to summarize their impressions of the day before going to sleep, others to wait for or go to find someone beloved. In the morning, lovers separate mysteriously, exchanging a kiss, and resume, each according to their taste, the route to their multiple occupations. The variety of enjoyments excludes satiation. Enjoyment is for them perpetual.

  About once a week, approximately, when it is necessary, people assemble in the conference hall, otherwise known as the small internal cyclideon. They discuss major projects that are to be carried out. Those most versed in the specialized knowledge in question take the initiative of speaking. The statistics, projects and plans have already appeared in printed sheets in the newspapers; comments have already been made in small groups; their urgency has been generally recognized, or rejected by each individual. Thus, there is often only one voice, the unanimous voice, to acclaim or reject it. They do not vote; the majority or the minority never makes the law. If a proposal brings together a sufficient number of workers to carry it out, whether the workers are a majority or a minority, the proposal is carried out, such being the will of those adherent to it.

  More often than not, it happens that the majority rallies to the minority or the minority to the majority, as in an excursion to the country, some propose to go to Saint-Germain, others to Meudon, one to Sceaux and another to Fontenay, opinions are divided; then, in the end, each one cedes to the attraction of being with the others, and they all take the same route by common accord, without any authority than pleasure having governed them. Attraction is the entire law of their harmony. At the point of departure, however, as on the route, everyone is always free to abandon themselves to their caprice, to form a separate group if that suits them, to rest on the way if they are tired, or to turn back in they are bored. Constraint is the mother of all vices, so it is banished by reason from the territory of the Humanisphere. Egotism—intelligent egotism, of course—is too well-developed there for anyone to think of compelling his neighbor; and it is by virtue of egotism that one exchanges good deeds.

  Egotism is human; without egotism, humans would not exit. It is egotism that is the motive of all actions, the motor of all thought. That is what makes people think about self-preservation, and self-development—which is also preservation. It is egotism that instructs an individual to produce in order to consume, to please others in order to be pleased by them, to love others in order to be loved by them, to work for others in order that they will work for him.

  It is egotism that stimulates ambition and excites people to distinguish themselves in all the careers in which they exercise their strength, skill and intelligence. It is egotism that raises them to the heights of genius; it is in order to grow, to enlarge the circle of their influence, that people raise their heads and look into the distance; it is with a view to personal satisfactions that they march to the conquest of collective satisfactions. It is for themselves, as individuals, that they want to participate in the lively effervescence of general happiness; it is for themselves that they dread the sight of the suffering of others. It is for themselves, too, that they are emotional when someone else is in peril; it is to themselves that they are bringing help in bringing it to others.

  Egotism, incessantly spurred by the instinct of progressive conservation and the sentiment of solidarity that links people to their peers solicits perpetual emanations of one’s own existence into the existence of others. That is what the old society called, inaccurately, devotion, and which is nothing but speculation, speculation that is more humanitarian the more intelligent it is, the more humanicidal the more imbecilic it is. Humans in society only reap what they sow, malady if they sow malady, health if they sow health.

  Humans are the social cause of all the effects to which they submit socially. If they are fraternal, they will effectuate fraternity on the part of others; if they are fratricidal, they will effectuate fratricide on the part of others. Humans cannot make a movement, an action of the hand, the heart or the brain, without the sensation reverberating from one to another like an electric commotion. And that happens in the estate of anarchic community, the estate of free and intelligent nature, as in the estate of civilization, the estate of domesticated humankind, of nature enchained. Except that in civilization, humans, being institutionally at war with other humans, can only be jealous of the happiness of their neighbors and howl and bite to their detriment; they are tethered dogs crouching in their niches gnawing their bone and growling with ferocious and continuous menace. In anarchy, humans, being harmoniously at peace with their fellows, are only able to compete in passions with others in order to arrive at the possession of universal happiness.

  In the Humanisphere, a hive where liberty is queen, humans only collect perfumes from other humans, and only produce honey.

  Let us, therefore, not curse egotism, for to curse egotism is to curse human being. The compression of our passions is the sole cause of their disastrous effects. Humans, like society, are perfectible. General ignorance has been the fatal cause of all our woes, universal science will be the remedy. Let us therefore educate ourselves, and spread education around us. Let us analyze, compare, meditate, and, moving from induction to induction, and deduction to deduction, let us arrive at the scientific knowledge of our natural mechanism.

  In the Humanisphere, there is no government. An attractive organization takes the place of legislation. Sovereignly individual liberty presides over all collective decisions. The authority of anarchy, the absence of any dictatorship of number or force, replaces the arbitrariness of authority, the dispositive of the sword and the law. Faith in oneself is the whole religion of humanispherians. Gods and priests, religious superstitions, arouse a universal reproval among them. The Humanispherians do not recognize any kind of theocracy or aristocracy, but individual autonomy. It is by their own laws that everyone governs themselves, and it is on that universal self-government that social order is based.

  Interrogate history, and see whether authority has ever been anything but individual suicide. Will you call “order” the annihilation of humans by humans? Is it order that reigns in Paris, Warsaw, Saint Petersburg, Vienna, Rome, Naples and Madrid, in aristocratic England and democratic America? I tell you, myself, that it is murder. Order with the dagger or the cannon, the scaffold or the guillotine; order with Siberia or Cayenne, with the knout or the bayonet, with the watchman’s stick or the guardsman’s sword; the order personified in the homicidal trinity of iron, gold and holy water; the order of rifle-shots, Bibles and banknotes; the order enthroned on cadavers and nourished thereon, is perhaps that of moribund civilizations, but it will never be anything but disorder and gangrene in societies that have the sentiment of existence

  Authorities are vampires, and vampires are monsters that only inhabit cemeteries and only walk in darkness.

  Consult your memories and you will see that the greatest absence of authority has always produced the greatest sum of harmony. Lo
ok at the people from the height of their barricades and say whether, in those moments of temporary anarchy, they do not testify by their conduct in favor of natural order. Among the men who are there, bare-armed and black with powder, there is certainly no lack of ignorant natures, men scarcely rough-hewn by the scraper of social education, and capable, in private life and as the heads of families, of many brutalities toward their wives and children. Look at them, then, in the midst of the public insurrection and in their quality as men momentarily free. Their brutality has been transformed as if by enchantment into mild courtesy. If a woman passes by they have only decent and polite words for her. It is with an entirely fraternal urgency that they will help her across the rampart of paving-stones. Those men who, while out walking on Sunday, would have blushed to carry their child and would have left the entire burden to the mother, take in their arms with a smile of satisfaction the child of a stranger in order to help her over the barricade. It is an instantaneous metamorphosis. In the man of the day you would not recognize the man of yesterday. Let Authority be re-edified and the man of tomorrow will soon revert to the man of yesterday.

  Again, recall the day of the distribution of flags after February 1848. There was no gendarme or agent of public force in the crowd, larger than it had ever been at any fête; no authority “protected” circulation; everyone was, so to speak, their own security. Well, was there ever more order than in that disorder? Who was trampled? No one. Not one blockage. It was up to them to protect one another. The multitude flowed, compactly, through the boulevards and the streets as naturally as the blood of a person in good health circulates in their arteries. In humans it is malady that produces swelling; in multitudes, it is the police and the armed force; malady then bears the name of authority. Anarchy is the state of health of multitudes.

  Another example:

  It was in 1841, I believe, aboard a frigate of war. The officers and the commandant, every time he presided over the maneuvering, swore and raged at the sailors, and the more they swore, the more they raged, the more the maneuver was executed poorly. There was one officer on board who was an exception to the rule. When he was on watch, he did not say four words, and always spoke with an entirely feminine softness. No maneuver was ever better and more rapidly carried out than under his orders. If it was a matter of taking a reef in the topsails, it was done in the blink of an eye, and as soon as the reef was taken, as soon as the topsails were hoisted, the pulleys were fuming. A fairy could not have acted more promptly with the flick of magic wand. Even before the command was given, everyone was at his post, ready to climbs into the shrouds or slacken the halyards. They were not waiting for him to give the order but for him to permit the maneuver. And there was not the slightest confusion, not one knot forgotten, nothing that was not rigorously executed. There was enthusiasm and harmony.

  Would you like to know the magical secret of that officer and the manner he adopted in order to operate the miracle? He did not swear, he did not rage, he did not command; in a word, he let things happen. And that was the best thing to do. Humans are like that; under the lash of authority, the sailor only acts as a brute; he goes stupidly or leadenly when he is shoved. Left to his anarchic initiative, he acts as a man, he operates with his hands and his intelligence.

  The example I am citing took place aboard the frigate Calypso in the Oriental seas. The officer in question only remained aboard for two months; the commandant and officers were jealous of him.

  So, the absence of orders is the true order. The law and the sword are only the order of bandits, the code of theft and murder that presides over the division of booty and he massacre of victims. It is on that bloody pivot that the civilized world turns. Anarchy is its antipode, and that antipode is the axis of the Humanispherian world

  Liberty is their only government.

  Liberty is their only constitution.

  Liberty is their only legislation.

  Liberty is their only regulation.

  Liberty is their only contract.

  Everything that is not liberty is external to mores.

  Liberty, total liberty and nothing but liberty: such is the formula engraved in the tales of their consciousness, the criterion of all their relationships.

  Is there a shortage in one corner of Europe of the products of another continent? The newspapers of the Humanisphere mention it; it is inserted in the Bulletin of Publicity, the monitor of anarchic universality; and the Humanispheres of Asia, Africa, America or Oceania expedite the product requested. Is there, on the contrary, a European product of which there is a lack in Asia, Africa, America or Oceania? The Humanispheres of Europe dispatch it. The exchange takes place naturally and not arbitrarily. If one Humanisphere gives more one day and receives less, what does it matter? Tomorrow it will doubtless receive more and give less. Everything belongs to everyone and anyone can change their Humanisphere as they can change their apartment. What does it matter, in the universal circulation, if something is here or there? What difference does it make? Is everyone not free to go wherever he wishes and bring to themselves whatever they want?

  In anarchy, consumption aliments itself by production. A Humanispherian would no more understand a man being forced to work than a man being forced to eat. The need to work is as imperious in humans as the need to eat; a human being is not all stomach; he has arms and a brain, and obviously, it is to enable them to function. Manual and intellectual labor are the nourishment that enable him to live. If a human being had no more needs than the needs of the mouth and the stomach, he would no longer be a human being but an oyster, and then, instead of hands and the attributes of intelligence, nature would have given him, like the mollusk, two halves of a shell.

  “What about indolence? What about sloth?” you shout at me.

  O civilized, indolence is not the child of liberty and human genius, but of slavery and civilization; it is something filthy and unnatural that can only be encountered in old and modern Sodoms. Sloth is a debauchery of the arm, a torpor of the mind. Indolence is not an enjoyment, it is a gangrene and a paralysis. Only decrepit societies, doddering worlds and corrupt civilizations can produce and propagate such scourges. The humanispherians satisfy the arm’s need for exercise as naturally as they satisfy the stomachs. It is no more possible to ration the appetite for production than the appetite for consumption. It is for everyone to consume and produce in accordance with his strength and his needs.

  By curbing all human beings under a uniform retribution, one starves some and causes others to die of indigestion. Only the individual is capable of knowing the dose of labor that his stomach, his brain or his hand can digest. A horse in the stable is rationed; the master grants a domestic animal a fixed amount of nourishment; but at liberty, the animal rations itself, and its instinct offers better than the master what suits its temperament. Untamed animals scarcely know disease; having everything in profusion they no longer battle one another to pull up a sprig of grass. They know that the prairie produces more pasture than they can consume, and they graze it in peace alongside one another. Why do humans fight to snatch consumption from one another when production, by means of mechanical forces, could furnish more than they need?

  Authority is indolence.

  Liberty is labor.

  Only the slave is indolent, rich or poor; the rich man is the slave of prejudice and false knowledge; the poor man is the slave of ignorance and prejudice. Both are the slaves of the law, one for submitting to it, the other for imposing it. It would not be the same for the free man. Would it not be suicidal for him to condemn his productive faculties to inertia?

  An inert human is not human; he is less than a brute, for a brute acts in accordance with its means, obedient to its instinct. Whoever possesses a particle of intelligence can do no less than obey it, and intelligence is not indolence; it is fertile movement; it is progress. The intelligence of humans is their instinct, and that instinct says, incessantly: labor; put the hand and the head to work; produce and discover; prod
uction and discovery is liberty. Who does not labor does not enjoy. Labor is life; sloth is death; die or labor!

  In the Humanisphere, property not being divided, everyone has an interest in being productive. The aspirations of science, thus rid of the fragmentation of thought, invent and improve communally machines appropriate to all purposes. By means of all the activity and rapidity of labor, an exuberance of production bursts forth around humankind. As in the earliest ages of the world, humans have no more to do than to reach out their hand in order to seize a fruit, no more to do than lie down at the foot of the tree to have shelter, except that the tree is now a magnificent monument in which all the satisfactions of luxury are found; the fruit is everything flavorsome that that the arts and sciences can offer.

  That is anarchy, no longer in the marshy forest with miry idiocy and umbrageous bestiality, but anarchy in an enchanted garden, with limpid intelligence and smiling humanity. It is anarchy, no longer in weakness and ignorance, the nucleus of savagery, barbarity and civilization, but anarchy in strength and knowledge, the trunk and branches of harmony, the glorious blossoming of humanity in flower, of free human being, in the regions of the azure and under the radiation of universal solidarity.

  Among the humanispherians, a man who can only handle a single implement, whether that implement be a pen or a file, would blush with shame at the mere thought. Human being wants to be complete, and is only complete on condition of knowing a great deal. The man who is only a man of the pen or a man of the file is a castrated individual, whom the civilized might well admit or admire in their churches or their factories, their workshops or their academies, but he is not a natural man; he is a monstrosity who would only provoke avoidance and disgust among the improved humans of the Humanisphere.