** Excerpts from "Listen Little Man" Translation by Ralph Manheim © 1974 by Mary Boyd Higgins as Trustee of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund . Images © William Steig
You're a "little man," a "common man." Don't run away! Have the courage to look at yourself!
(...)
You despise yourself, little man. You say "Who am I that I should have an opinion, govern my life, and call the world mine?" You're right: who are you to lay claim to your life? I will tell you who you are. You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task which meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness, endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. (...)
YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say! (...) I say: Only you yourself can be your liberator! (...)
The little man doesn't want to hear the truth about himself. He doesn't want the great responsibility that has fallen to him, that is his whether he likes it or not. He wants to go on being a little man, or to become a little big man. (...)
I'm afraid of you, little man, very much afraid, because the future of mankind depends on you. I'm afraid of you because your main aim in life is to escape--from yourself. You're sick, little man, very sick. It's not your fault; but it's your responsibility to get well. (...)
I tell you, little man, you've lost all feeling for the best that is in you. You've stifled it. And when you find something worthwhile in others, in your children, your wife, your husband, your father or mother, you kill it. Little man, you're small and you want to stay small. (...)
You are not always small, little man. I know you have your "great moments," your "flights of enthusiasm" and "exaltation." But you lack the perserverance to let your enthusiasm soar, to let your exaltation carry you higher and higher. You're afraid to soar, afraid of heights and depths. Nietzsche told you that long ago, far better than I can. (...)
I want you to stop being subhuman and become "yourself." "Yourself." I say. Not the newspaper you read, not your vicious neighbor's opinion, but "yourself." I know and you don't, what you really are deep down. Deep down, you are what a deer, your God, your poet, or your philosopher is. But you think you're a member of the VFW, your bowling club, or the Ku Klux Klan. And because you think so, you behave as you do. This too was told you long ago, by Heinrich Mann in Germany, by Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos in the United States. But you recognize only the heavy weight champion and Al Capone.(...)
You value security before truth. (...)
When you drag thousands of men, women, and children to the gas chambers, you're only obeying orders. Is that right, little man? And you're so innocent you don't even know that such things are happening. And you're only a poor devil, whose opinion counts for nothing, who hasn't even got one. And who are you, anyway, that you should meddle with politics? I know, I know! I've heard all that many times. But then I ask: Why don't you do your duty in silence when a wise man tells you that you and you alone are responsible for what you do, or tries to persuade you not to beat your children, or pleads with you for the thousandth time to stop obeying dictators? What becomes of your duty, your innocent obedience, then? No, little man, when truth speaks, you don't listen. You listen only to bluster. And then you shout Hurrah! Hurrah! You're cowardly and cruel, little man; you have no sense of your true duty, which is to be a man and to preserve humanity. You imitate wise men so badly and bandits so well. Your movies and radio programs are full of murder.(...)
You will drag yourself and you meanness through many centuries before becoming your own master. I'm bidding you goodbye in order to work more effectively for your future, because when I'm far away you can't kill me, and you respect my work more in the distance than close at hand. You despise anything that's too close to you! That's why you put your proletarian general or marshal on a pedestal: then, however contemptible he may be, you can respect him. And that's why great men have given you a wide berth since the dawn of history.
You ask me, little man, when you will have a good, secure life. The answer is alien to your nature.
You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion; when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life--you have it in you, little man, somewhere deep down in a corner of your being; when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings; when you've learned to recognize two things in their season: your gifts and the onset of old age; when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors: when you cease to set more store by a marriage certificate than by love between man and woman; when you learn to recognize your errors promptly and not too late, as you do today; when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats; when instead of enraging you as it does today, your adolescents daughter's happiness in love makes your heart swell with joy; when you can only shake your head at the memory joy; when you can only shake your head at the memory of the days when small children were punished for touching their sex organs; when the human faces you see on the street are no longer drawn with grief and misery but glow with freedom, vitality, and serenity; when human bodies cease to walk this earth with rigid, retracted pelvises and frozen sex organs.
You ask for guidance and advice, little man. For thousands of years you have had guidance and advice, good and bad. Not bad advice but your own smallness is to blame for your persistent wretchedness. I could give you good advice, but in view of the way you think and are, you wouldn't be able to convert it into action for the benefit of all. (...)
"Am I then utterly worthless? You don't give me credit for one ounce of decency. You make hash out of me. But look here. I work hard, I support my wife and children, I try to lead a good life, I serve my country. I can't be as bad as all that!"
I know you're a decent, industrious, cooperative animal, comparable to a bee or an ant. All I've done is to lay bare the little man in you, who has been wrecking your life for thousands of years. You are great, little man, when you're not mean and small. Your greatness, little man, is the only hope we have left. You're great when you attend lovingly to your trade, when you take pleasure in carving and building and painting, in sowing and reaping, in the blue sky and the deer and the morning dew, in music and dancing, in your growing children, and in the beautiful body of your wife or husband; when you go to the planetarium to study the stars, to the library to read what other men and women have thought about life. You're great when your grandchild sits on your lap and you tell him of times long past and look into the uncertain future with his sweet, childlike curiosity. You're great, mother, when you lull your baby to sleep; when with tears in your eyes you pray fervently for his future happiness; and when hour after hour, year after year, you build this happiness in your child.
You're great, little man, when you sing the good, warmhearted folk songs, or when you dance the old dances to the tune of an accordion, because folk songs are good for the soul, and they're the same the world over. And you're great when you say to your friend:"I thank my fate that I've been able to live my life free from filth and greed, to see my children grow and to look on as they first began to babble, to take hold of things, to walk, to play, to ask questions, to laugh and to love; that I've been able to preserve, in all its freedom and purity, my feeling for the springtime and its gentle breezes, for the gurgling of the brook that flows past my house and the singing of the birds in the woods; that I've taken no part in the gossip of malicious neighbors; that I've been happy in the embrace of my wife or husband and have felt the stream of life in my body; that I haven't lost my bearings in troubled times, and that my life has had meaning and continuity. For I have always hearkened to the gentle voice within me that said, 'Only one thing matters: live a good, happy life. Do your heart's bidding, even when it leads you on paths that timid souls would avoid. Even when life is a torment, don't let it harden you.'"
