“He’s right, you know,” someone else said.
The old man grinned. “Not me. Us! We all know it. Take a thing like Hitler. He is an opposite. The world around him was trying to struggle toward ideals of liberty, individualism, morality, restraint of force, decency, democracy, and so on. Hitler attacked with all the opposites to those ideals. He was able to, because the people under him had not yet understood the ideals; and also because they were willing to exchange freedom for the irresponsibility of slaves; and still more, because their circumstances did not seem suitable to their egos. But—they didn’t want to do a lot of hard, moral work. They’re still, so to speak, social infants. Or social ignoramuses. All right. Hitler took every single opposite. Force, torture, suppression of individual rights, conquest, amorality, autocracy.
He got going in a big way for the main and simple reason that we—on the other side—instead of recognizing the valid power of Hitler’s theorems assumed we had legislated ’em out of existence. Believing that, we ignored the contrary evidence. Hitler pushed ahead. We kept saying he’d collapse, because we believed we’d predisqualified him. As long as we felt that way our own feelings gave his opposite practices the power they proved to have.”
Even Mr. Wilson cocked an eyebrow. “Never thought of that,” he said slowly.
Jimmie’s boss turned. “Take you, Wilson. You and your crowd. You’ve been against war and in favor of peace. I’ve been on the opposite side of the fence. In my opinion, you’ve shut your eyes to my side of the picture. You won’t believe that this awful, negative pole of human energy can ever roll across U.S. and Muskogewan, and swamp the works. Not believing that you think I’m a wanton ass. I don’t think that about you though. Your love of peace and prosperity is also a love of mine. I don’t happen to believe it’s possible at the moment. But I do believe it holds the seeds of the future. I do believe it is the one powerful opposite we Americans mustn’t lose sight of, even if we eventually bomb the damned Rhine dry and march up it clear to Switzerland. It is a well-known fact that Satan gives the Lord his due, in a constant, respectful fear. But I see mighty few Christians around these days who understand how to give the devil his due!”
Mr. Wilson cleared his throat uncomfortably.
“To go back to women,” said the old man, grinning archly, as everyone—and especially the women—listened harder, “she’s the opposite of man and the complement of man, the inspiring flame and the devouring mother, the object out of which his awareness is born and the object that gives him his first intimations of mortality. In still another sense, she is his immortality. Insofar as the present attempt of women to look and be like men represents an honest effort to integrate and to reconcile oppositeness—it’s sound and it’s honest. That is—it’s truth. But insofar as it represents an attempt by women to become men, it obeys the law I’m discussing.”
“Meaning what?” Mr. Wilson asked.
“Meaning,” Mr. Corinth replied blandly, “the young men act like hysterical girls.”
He looked at Jimmie. “Won’t help, refuse to serve, duck the draft, rage and yell around about their rights. And the old men”—his eyes wandered to Mr. Wilson—“are just—old women.”