Seduction of the Superman: For fifty years GB Shaw expressed a desire for state liquidation of recalcitrant or incorrigibly unproductive citizens in the hope of clearing the ground for a higher kind of human creature

The Utopian Imagination of George Bernard Shaw: Totalitarianism and the Seduction of the Superman. Matthew B Yde. PhD Thesis, Ohio State Univ, 2011. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=osu1313083659&disposition=inline

Abstract: Playwright George Bernard Shaw has a reputation as a humanitarian, an indefatigable seeker of justice and, in his own words, a ―world betterer. But this reputation is difficult to reconcile with his support for the totalitarian regimes and dictators that emerged after the First World War, which is not so well known. This enthusiasm is usually dismissed as an expression of Shaw‘s well known propensity for comic exaggeration and hyperbole, his pugnacious rhetoric, his love of paradox, and especially his addiction to antagonizing the British political establishment. However, as I believe this dissertation proves, Shaw‘s support was genuine, rooted in his powerful desire for absolute control over the unruly and chaotic, in a deep psychological longing for perfection. Shaw expressed rigid control over his own bodily instincts, and looked for political rulers of strong will and utopian designs to exercise similar control over unruly social elements.

It is occasionally stated that Shaw‘s support for totalitarianism grew out of his frustration with nineteenth century liberalism, which ineffectually culminated in a disastrous world war. Yet close analysis to two of Shaw‘s Major Critical Essays from the 1890s shows that even then Shaw expressed a desire for a ruthless man of action unencumbered by the burden of conscience to come on the scene and establish a new world order, to initiate the utopian epoch. Indeed, a further analysis of a number of plays from before the war shows the impulse to be persistent and undeniable. This dissertation attempts to reveal the genuineness of Shaw‘s totalitarianism by looking at his plays and prefaces, articles, speeches and letters, but is especially concerned to analyze the utopian desire that runs through so many of Shaw‘s plays, looking at his political and eugenic utopianism as it is expressed in his drama and comparing it to his political totalitarianism. Shaw considered himself a ―revolutionary writer, and his activity as a socialist agitator, propagandist for Creative Evolution, and world famous playwright must be seen as growing out of the same utopian impulse. For fifty years Shaw expressed a desire for state liquidation of recalcitrant or incorrigibly unproductive citizens in the hope of clearing the ground for a ―higher kind of human creature. While Shaw knew that the public was not ready to act on such controversial ideas, he did hope that by disseminating his ideas through highly entertaining plays and essays they would take root in the mind and be activated later by the power of the will. This is how Lamarckian evolution works, and his method is a species of Fabian permeation. As Keegan says in John Bull’s Other Island, ―every jest is an earnest in the womb of time. By looking closely at Shaw‘s plays and connecting them to his political activity, we will see that for Shaw the dictators were provisional supermen clearing the way for the advent of the real supermen who would come later, such as we see in the utopian plays that Shaw wrote in the last three decades of his life.