And yet, on the other hand, the State as we know it is very largely, if not entirely, the result of the actual and moral exhaustion of society, with a small s. The actual, baffling, continuing, and wounding relations which obtain among human beings cause us to long for Authority as deeply as we long for water: and the personal authority surrenders to a larger one, which, if it cannot save us from death, can protect us from chaos. (To be Catholic, with a large C, for example, is not at all the same thing as being catholic.) Hence, we need victims: object lessons. And this need, which never fails to announce itself as Moral, has nothing whatever to do with morality or any moral hope. This need becomes the quicksand in which all hope of the moral life expires. Yet, there lives, always and with unpredictable results, within the human being who is society something which that Society which controls him—and which he has created—can never know, or reach. It is this inchoate, largely incoherent, and irrepressible energy which has demolished empires.
