Ликолампи

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That is very hard to say. In any case, the magician State – unless it involves vulgar conjurers – is vastly preferable to the police State, to the State which, in order to defend its own out-of-date “culture,” does not hesitate to repress all liberties and the illusion of liberties, changing itself into a prison where all hope is lost. Too much subtlety and too much flexibility are the main faults of the magician State, which can degenerate and change into a sorcerer-State; a total lack of subtlety and of flexibility are the main defects of the police State, which has abased itself to the status of jailer State. But the essential difference between the two, the one which works altogether in favor of the first, is that magic is a science of metamorphoses with the capacity to change, to adapt to all circumstances, to improve, whereas the police always remains just what it is: in this case, the defender to the death of out-of-date values, of a political oligarchy useless and pernicious to the life of nations. The system of restraints is bound to perish, for what it defends is merely an accumulation of slogans without any vitality. The magician State, on the other hand, only expects to develop new possibilities and new tactics, and it is precisely excess of vitality which impedes its good running order. Certainly, it too can only take advantage of an infinitesimal part of its magic resources. But we surmise that these are so extraordinarily rich, that, in principle, they should have no difficulty in uprooting the decayed tree of police ideology. Why does that not happen? Because the subtlety of those internal forces at play exhausts the attention of the magician State, which reveals itself ill prepared to attack the question of a fundamental and effective magic in its external relationships. This monster of intelligence finds itself without weapons when long-term operations are involved or when it ought to create a “charming” image in international relations. Its pragmatism, lacking in ceremony and in circumspection, results in an image which, however false, is nevertheless repugnant in its partners’ eyes, and this absence of promises and of Byzantine speeches, when all is said and done, proves as counterproductive as its obvious excesses of intelligence and its well-known incapacity to propose radical solutions.

If we can be surprised by the fact that the police-State can still function, we can just as well ask why the magician State, with boundless resources, functions so badly that it seems daily to lose ground vis-à-vis the ideological and territorial strides made by the other one.

The conclusion is ineluctable: it is that the magician State exhausts its intelligence in creating internal changes, showing itself incapable of working out a long-term magic to neutralize the hypnosis induced by the advancing cohorts of police. Yet the future seems to belong to it anyway, and even the provisional victory of the police State would leave no doubt concerning this point: coercion by the use of force will have to yield to the subtle processes of magic, science of the past, of the present and of the future.

Pp. 104-6

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