Ilyin: "On Political Depravity and Blindness"

a translation from the Russian

Notes on the text: This is one of 223 articles written by Ivan Aleksandrovich Ilyin (1883-1954) and disseminated by the White-aligned Russian All-Military Union throughout the years 1948-1955 under the general name “Our Tasks”. Two years after Ilyin’s death, in 1956, these articles were collected into a new two-tome book of the same name. They are meant to be read as a single two-tome book, and I hope to eventually unify all my past and future translations of these articles into a single printed work for all English readers.

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When one observes, year after year, the political life in the formal democracies of the West, one marvels at the extent to which the primacy of quantity has suppressed and supplanted the requirements of quality. Whence this confidence that state affairs are so elementary, simple, universally accessible and easy to comprehend that they require no qualifications — neither mental, nor moral, nor political? A shoemaker takes a long time to learn shoemaking, yet in politics political training is purportedly unnecessary. A potter without skill is of no value, yet in public affairs every passer-by, who has reached the age of twenty and is evidently not raving mad, even if his political competence were zero, supposedly has an understanding of the affairs of state. Look at the analytical power of judgment that a worker in an electrical shop cultivates; when he makes installations, when he has to determine why you have a “blown fuse,” he contemplates your entire apartment, traces the trails of the wires, mentally at first, and then physically isolates every switch and every bulb… And he gets his job done. He has trained for this. He has mastery of his subject. He understands, knows, judges and serves responsibly. And state business is infinitely more complicated; politics is infinitely more demanding; and the scope here is not of apartment scale at all…

And suddenly it turns out that the state is a matter of the streets. Just as anyone can walk down the street, everyone is permitted to do so, everyone is fit for it, so in politics — no quality is necessary. No “competence” is needed here: no analysis, no synthesis, no deductions, no understanding, no responsibility; “walk about” — and that’s all there is to it. However, this is also an illusion, because civilization reminds us at every turn that walking down the street is an art, or else you will end up in a hospital or a morgue. But to judge in politics — to choose, to be elected, to adhere to parties, to demand, to negotiate, to keep silent at a favorable moment, to lie at another moment, to take a plunge, to please and to sneak in — all this is within everyone’s reach, it is granted to everyone “by nature,” for this neither quality nor qualification is required.

And so politics, indifferent to the quality of its individuals, qualitatively declines; and state decay begins.