24 | MP introduction

that it is difficult to love somebody, or to be intimate with
somebody, one has never seen. In order to reach its full maturity,
our social behaviour has to be fused with our sexual and homo-
sexual inclinations, which, even in their sublimated form, require
physical contact and the physical presence of their object, and
are nothing without the body.

In addition, the cell is built on a mutual give and take, and
a common sense of value, or a positive attachment to positive
aims. Its members must be not very unequal in either income or
status. Adam after the fall could not have been more different
from what he was in his original state, than the modern citizen
of an industrial country is from men who live in a social cell.

It remains to say a few words about the third feature of the
modern mass. Staggering inequalities cannot be maintained for
any length of time without oppression. Although it is one of
the chief tasks of modern propaganda to convince the average
citizen that he is not oppressed, the propaganda would remain
ineffective if it did not make use of the traits created in
people by oppression. In order to remove the vague emotional
associations of the word 'oppression', we have to define it
clearly. People are oppressed if, economically, they are hope-
lessly dependent on their masters, if, sociologically, they are
treated as inferiors, and if, psychologically, many of their
private and most of their collective actions are governed
by frustration, anger and fear. It will be admitted that the
definition fits nine persons out of ten.[29]

It would be sweet to speculate on the kind of propaganda
that would appeal to 'dis-oppressed' masses. Such speculations