Truth and belief
Sir: Youreditorial (22 July) on facing Soviet reality is most impressive. What needs to be understood, however, is that there are two levels of truth, both equally valid in their proper frame, but not equal intrinsically. Indeed, the lesser of the two is in practice more powerful than the greater in its immediate effect.
The lesser of these two forms of truth is that which rests on the common consent of a group of people, and is largely independent of the greater. It exercises a hypnotic effect upon those 'infected' by it, so that they are ready to obey it even in the face of the most trenchant evidence of its error. It will welcome any and everything that supports its airy structures, and can make dupes of the wisest so that they see black as white and vice versa. Gustave Le Bon, in his book The Crowd, gave a number of instances where a belief that is shared by many people car' exert a hallucinatory power.
It is the task of a successful social innovator to create the nucleus of original belief which can draw together an organised crowd, so to say, and this once achieved, Will create the lesser form of truth. The organ" isation will, of course, seek to perpetuate itself; to do which it must constantly assert that it is perpetuating the nucleus of belief which brought it into being, a belief which is treated as having been based on the greater form of truth. It never is. But those who govern the organisation must take stern measures to ensure so far as they can that the two levels of belief are one and the same, for once doubt is allowed to creep in, it will destroy the organisation sooner or later. If one says that the present rulers of Russia are 'gangsters', then one would be driven admit that the rulers of the various stages°' the development of the organisation of the 'Christian church were governed by pious gangsters, for they stopped at no horror to try to perpetuate the beliefs on which their organisation depended, and the practical truth of this is shown if, indeed, it needs any proof, in the disintegration of the Christian church into a mass of individual opinions and tastes.
I am by no means suggesting that religion should be organised in the totalitarian way' was in earlier times, but lam saying that the determination of the Kremlin no more, deserves the stigma which your editorial invites than did the determination of the Vatican in its heyday. I have spent a great deal of my life in showing the only way in which religion may be properly organised, with a right balance between Authority and individual Freedorn. But this balance could only be obtained if religion were not based upon mere op1ni011, and belief, but upon principles of mental activity both individ ual and collective.! have shown in my writings that this can be done, and that the Bible is, in both the Old and the, New Testaments, virtually a handbook or mental and moral science.
Francis J. Mott Summerhill, Mark Beech, Edenbridge, Kent
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