"The dictatorial mouths everywhere are met at present by the innumerable addicts of alcohol - from the monotony of daily tasks - , the myriad repressed, all smothered in an immense sado-masochist narcissim, all deriving from researches, experiments and social sincerity. People talk to me too much about youth, the evil is deeper than youth! In fact, I see in youth only a mobilisation of desires for apéritifs, sports, automobiles and shows, nothing new. The young, at least as regards ideas, for the most part lag behind the gossiping, money-grubbing, homicidal R.A.T.s In this context, to remain fair, let us note that the youth does not exist in the Romantic sense that we still lend to this word. From the age of ten the destiny of man seems quite fixed in its emotive sources; after this period we exist only through insipid, increasingly less sincere and more theatrical repetitions. Perhaps, after all, the “civilisations” will suffer the same fate? Ours seems to be quite concentrated in an incurable militant psychosis. We live only for this sort of destructive repetitions. When we observe from what rancid prejudices, what rotten nonsense the absolute fanaticism of millions of so-called evolved individuals, instructed in the best schools of Europe, can be nourished we are certainly authorised to ask ourselves if the instinct of death in man, in his societies, does not already definitively dominate the instinct of life. German, French, Chinese, Wallachian. Dictatorships or not. Nothing but pretexts to keep playing, to the death.
I would like to explain everything through the malign defensive reactions of capitalism or extreme misery. But things are not so simple or as significant. Neither profound misery nor police oppression justifies these mass rushes towards extreme, aggressive, ecstatic nationalisms of entire countries. One can certainly explain things in this manner to the faithful who are already quite convinced in advance, the same people to whom was explained twelve months ago the imminent, unmistakable arrival of Communism in Germany. But the taste for wars and massacres could not have for its essential source the appetite for conquest, power and benefits of the ruling classes. Everything has been said, exposed, in this matter without anybody having been disgusted. The present unanimous sadism proceeds above all from a desire for nothingness profoundly installed in man, and especially in the masses, a sort of almost irresistible amorous unanimous impatience for death. With coquetry of course, and a thousand denials, but the tropism is there, and so much more powerful in that it is perfectly secret and silent."