HELEN. I imagine that there are only a very few people who share your nature. It must be a joy to be born with it.
LOTH. Actually, one isn't really born with it. I think we are driven to it by the essential wrongness of the conditions that life imposes. But one must have deep feeling for that which is wrong –that's the crucial point. And when a man has that feeling and consciously suffers the wrongness of the human condition, it necessarily follows that he will become the sort of man that I am.
HELEN. Oh, if I only knew more. . . . What, for instance, would you call "wrong conditions"?
LOTH. All right! A few examples: It is wrong when the man who works in the sweat of his brow goes hungry while the indolent live in luxury. It is wrong to condemn murder in peacetime while we reward it in war. It is wrong to despise the executioner while we glorify the soldier brandishing his instruments of slaughter, strutting around with his rapier or his sabre at his side. Were that executioner to parade the same way with his axe, he would probably be stoned by an irate populace. And, finally, it is wrong to set up a state religion that calls itself the faith of Christ – a faith which teaches suffering, forgiveness and love – and then to train the people of entire nations to go out and butcher their fellow human beings in the name of that faith. And remember, these are only a few of the millions of examples of such madness. It takes no mean amount of effort to come to grips with all of these horrid conditions. One must begin early in life.
HELEN. How did you ever manage to become aware of all this? It seems so simple, yet most people never give it a second thought.
LOTH. The way I grew up probably taught me what I had to know. That and conversations with friends, intensive reading, and a lot of independent thinking. I learned about the first of these wrongs when I was only a little boy. I once told a blatant lie, for which my father gave me a memorable hiding. Shortly thereafter, my father and I took a train ride together, and I discovered not only that my father also told lies, but that he considered it a matter of course to lie. I was five years old at that time, and my father told the conductor that I had not yet turned four. Children under four rode free of charge. Then I had a teacher who told us: work hard, be honest, and it shall follow as the night the day that you will prosper in this life. What that man taught us was not true; it didn't take me long to learn that. My father was a kind, honorable, honest, industrious, thoroughly solid citizen, and yet, a scoundrel who wallows in affluence to this day swindled him out of his last few thousand in savings. And my father, driven by need, had to take a menial job in a huge soap factory owned by this very scoundrel.
HELEN. People like myself hardly ever think of such things as major wrongs. At most we might feel that some injustice has been done, but we feel it only privately, and in silence. Come to think of it, I feel it quite often – and then a kind of despair takes hold of me.
LOTH. I remember one great wrong with particular clarity. I had always believed that there was no set of circumstances under which murder was not considered a crime, and punished as such. But after this incident, it became horribly clear to me that only the milder forms of murder are unlawful.
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