27 | SAGA I/27: Reasons for quitting politics

Revolution and from what was happening in Russia under our
very eyes, especially when compared with ›State and Revolution‹.

[3] It was Voigt who drew my attention to Swift's ›Gulliver's Travels‹
as a repository of profound political wisdom. In my ›Buddhist
Thought in India‹ [p. 20] I have referred to the Voyage to Laputa as
the best description of the sciential madness of our times. Voigt
himself showed me the classical passage in the Voyage to the
Houyhnhnms [ch. vii] about the democratic madness of our time.
This confirmed me in the belief that leaders of any democracy -
parliamentary, plutocratic, popular or racial - must be rotters,
because their adherents want them to be so. The ›ruling Yahoo‹ is
›always more deformed in Body and mischievous in Disposition
than any of the rest‹. ›He usually continues in Office till a worse
can be found; but the very Moment he is discarded, his Successor,
at the Head of all the Yahoos in that district, Young and Old, Male
and Female, come in a Body and discharge their Excrements upon
him, from Head to Foot.‹ What a valuable lesson that was!

[4] The basic thesis of his book was that Communism and Nazism are
secularized religions which try to establish the Kingdom of Heaven
on Earth. That ›is always the Procrustean Bed which can be made
to fit mankind only by War, terrorism, the prison, the
concentration camp, the firing squad and the hangman's rope‹
[p. 251]. Over the years this has led me to consider the relation of
modern thought to the traditional religions. I have found it to be
utterly barren, devoid of originality and subsisting only by
secularising ideas formerly expressed in a religious form.