Not only does the mass movement depict the present as mean and miserable—it deliberately makes it so. It fashions a pattern of individual existence that is dour, hard, repressive and dull. It decries pleasures and comforts and extols the rigorous life. It view ordinary enjoyment as as trivial or even disreputable, and represnets the persuit of personal happiness as immoral. To enjoy oneself is to have truck with the enemy—the present. The prime objective of the ascetic ideal preached by most mass movents is to breed contempt for the present.
When a mass movemnt perserves for generations the pattern shaped by its active phase (as in the case of the millitant church in the Middle Ages) or where by a successive accesssion of fanatical proselytes its orthadoxy is continually strenghtened (as in the case of Islam) the result is an era of stagnation—a dark age. Whenever we find a period of genuine creativeness associated with a mass movement, it is always a period which either preceeded or follows the active phase [...] the active phase itself is sterile.
The interference of an active mass movement with the creative process is deep-reaching and manifold. The fervor it generates drains the energies which would have flowed into creative work; fervor has the same effect on creativeness as dissipation. It subordinates creative work to to the advancement of the movement: literature, art and science must be propagandistic and the must be “practical”. The true believing writer, artist or scientist does not create to express himself, or to save his soul or to discover the true and beautiful; his task, as he sees it, is to warn, advise, urge, glorify and denounce. Moreover, the fanatical state of mind by itself can stifle all forms of creative work: the fanatic’s disdain for the present blinds him to the complexity and uniqueness of life. The things which stir the creative worker seem to him either trivial or corrupt. [...] The fanatic is also mentall cocky, and hence barren of new beginnings. At the root of his cockines is the conviction that life and the universe conform to a simple formula—his formula. He is thus without the fruitful invervals of groping, when the mind is as it were in solution—ready for all manner of new reactions, new combinations and new beginnings.
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