Discurso del astrólogo

The Astrologer went on: –At first, that thought seemed to me one of the many stupidities that abound in your ramblings... And yet, I ended up involuntarily asking myself why money can turn a man into a god, and all at once I realized that you had discovered an essential truth.

And do you know how I confirmed that you were right?

Why, by thinking that Henry Ford with his fortune could buy enough explosive to blow a planet like the moon to pieces.

His premise held up.

And you, implicitly, were in fact laying down a principle: the beginning of the reign of the superman.

Erdosain understood that the latter was speaking in earnest.

I asked myself whether it was possible for a god to renounce his powers... I asked myself whether a copper or oil king would let himself be stripped of his fleets, his mountains, his gold and his wells, and I realized that to give up that fabulous world one would have to have the spirituality of a Buddha or a Christ... and that they, the gods who had command of every force, would never permit their own dispossession.

Consequently, something enormous would have to happen.

The enormous thing is this: Humanity, the multitudes of the vast lands, have lost religion.

I don't mean the Catholic one.

I mean every theological creed.

Then men are going to say: "What do we want life for?..." No one will have any interest in preserving an existence of a mechanical character, because science has cut away all faith.

And the moment such a phenomenon occurs, an incurable plague will reappear on earth... the plague of suicide... Can you picture a world of furious people, dry-skulled, moving through the underground tunnels of the gigantic cities and howling at the reinforced-concrete walls: "What have they done with our god?..." And the little girls and the schoolgirls forming secret societies to take up the sport of suicide?

And men refusing to father children that the deluded Berthelot believed would feed themselves on synthetic pills?...

He had forgotten him.

That is what has really happened with the revolutionary movements of an economic character.

A moment ago you said that... –Erdosain objected.

And as I thought it over, I came to the conclusion that this was the metaphysical and terrible disease of every man.

Humanity's happiness can only rest on the metaphysical lie... Deprive it of that lie and it falls back into illusions of an economic character..., and then I remembered that the only ones who could give humanity back its lost paradise were the gods of flesh and blood: Rockefeller, Morgan, Ford... and I conceived a project that may seem fantastic to a mediocre mind... I saw that the dead end of social reality had a single way out... and it was to go back.

Erdosain, leaning back against a post, was watching Barsut's face, which was slowly steeping itself in an ironic, almost malevolent attentiveness, as if the words the Astrologer spoke deserved only mockery.

He, as if listening to himself, would walk, would stop, now and then he would tug at his hair.

He said:

The gods, sickened by reality, all illusion in science as a factor of happiness lost, surrounded by tiger-slaves, will provoke ghastly cataclysms, will spread the lightning plagues... For a few decades the work of the supermen and their servants will narrow down to destroying man in a thousand ways, until the world is almost exhausted... and only a remnant, a small remnant, will be set apart on some islet, on which the foundations of a new society will be laid.

With his brow set fierce, and his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, he shrugged his shoulders, asking:

And he went on:

The majority will live kept scrupulously in the most absolute ignorance, ringed about with apocryphal miracles, and therefore far more interesting than the historical miracles, and the minority will be the absolute custodian of science and power.

In this way the happiness of the majority is guaranteed, since the man of this caste will have a relationship with the divine world, in which today he does not believe.

The minority will administer the pleasures and the miracles for the herd, and the golden age, the age in which the angels prowled the roads of dusk and the gods let themselves be seen in the moonlit clearings, will be a fact.

That cannot be.

I know it cannot be, but one must proceed as if it were feasible.

Do you by any chance know what science is good for?

Don't you, in your own thinking, mock the learned and call them "those puffed up over perishable things"?

One must not contradict people just for the sake of it.

And the monstrous disproportion that you notice in my society exists right now in our own society, but in reverse.