In Search of the Miraculous

people, each individual will receive very little, and this small amount of knowledge

will change nothing either in his life or in his understanding of things. And however

large the number of people who receive this small amount of knowledge, it will

change nothing in their lives, except, perhaps, to make them still more difficult.

"But if, on the contrary, large quantities of knowledge are concentrated in a small

number of people, then this knowledge will give very great results. From this point of

view it is far more advantageous that knowledge should be preserved among a small

number of people and not dispersed among the masses.

"If we take a certain quantity of gold and decide to gild a number of objects with it, we must know, or calculate, exactly what number of objects can be gilded with this

quantity of gold. If we try to gild a greater number, they will be covered with gold

unevenly, in patches, and will look much worse than if they had no gold at all; in fact

we shall lose our gold.

"The distribution of knowledge is based upon exactly the same prin-

ciple. If knowledge is given to all, nobody will get any. If it is preserved among a

few, each will receive not only enough to keep, but to increase, what he receives.

"At the first glance this theory seems very unjust, since the position of those who

are, so to speak, denied knowledge in order that others may receive a greater share

appears to be very sad and undeservedly harder than it ought to be. Actually,

however, this is not so at all; and in the distribution of knowledge there is not the

slightest injustice.

"The fact is that the enormous majority of people do not want any knowledge

whatever; they refuse their share of it and do not even take the ration allotted to them, in the general distribution, for the purposes of life. This is particularly evident in

times of mass madness such as wars, revolutions, and so on, when men suddenly

seem to lose even the small amount of common sense they had and turn into complete

automatons, giving themselves over to wholesale destruction in vast numbers, in

other words, even losing the instinct of self-preservation. Owing to this, enormous

quantities of knowledge remain, so to speak, unclaimed and can be distributed among

those who realize its value.

"There is nothing unjust in this, because those who receive knowledge take nothing

that belongs to others, deprive others of nothing; they take only what others have

rejected as useless and what would in any case be lost if they did not take it.

"The collecting of knowledge by some depends upon the rejection of knowledge by

others.

"There are periods in the life of humanity, which generally coincide with the

beginning of the fall of cultures and civilizations, when the masses irretrievably lose

their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and

millenniums of culture. Such periods of mass madness, often coinciding with

geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary

character, release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge. This, in its turn,

necessitates the work of collecting this matter of knowledge which would otherwise

be lost. Thus the work of collecting scattered matter of knowledge frequently

coincides with the beginning of the destruction and fall of cultures and civilizations.

"This aspect of the question is clear. The crowd neither wants nor seeks

knowledge, and the leaders of the crowd, in their own interests, try to strengthen its

fear and dislike of everything new and unknown. The slavery in which mankind lives

is based upon this fear. It is even difficult to imagine all the horror of this slavery. We do not understand what people are losing. But in order to understand the cause of this slavery it is enough to see how people live, what constitutes the aim of their

existence, the object of their desires, passions, and aspirations, of what they think, of what they talk, what they serve and what they worship.

Consider what the cultured humanity of our time spends money on; even leaving the

war out, what commands the highest price; where the biggest crowds are. If we think

for a moment about these questions it becomes clear that humanity, as it is now, with

the interests it lives by, cannot expect to have anything different from what it has. But, as I have already said, it cannot be otherwise. Imagine that for the whole of mankind

half a pound of knowledge is allotted a year. If this knowledge is distributed among

everyone, each will receive so little that he will remain the fool he was. But, thanks to the fact that very few want to have this knowledge, those who take it are able to get,

let us say, a grain each, and acquire the possibility of becoming more intelligent. All

cannot become intelligent even if they wish. And if they did become intelligent it

would not help matters. There exists a general equilibrium which cannot be upset.

'That is one aspect. The other, as I have already said, consists in the fact that no one