When H.G. Wells published The Shape of Things to Come in 1933 he
dedicated it to "José Ortega y Gasset, Explorador." Wells had been an
explorer of that other country, the future, since The Time Machine in
1895, and more seriously since Anticipations in 1901, and he
recognized a kindred speculator in Ortega, whose Revolt of the Masses
had appeared in English translation the year before.
The future that was forecast there would not have surprised Wells in
his more somber moments. Europe, said Ortega, was "suffering from the
greatest crisis that can afflict peoples, nations and civilizations",
namely "the accession of the masses to complete social power." He
explained, with "a shudder of horror" (Ortega's colorful Castilian
can sound embarrassingly overdone in English): "The element of terror
in the destiny of our time is furnished by the overwhelming and
violent moral upheaval of the masses; imposing, invincible and
treacherous, as is destiny in every case." And he prophesied: "If
that human type [mass-man] continues to be master in Europe, thirty
years will suffice to send our continent back to barbarism."
Wells, who could be quite bloodthirsty about what should be done with
populations surplus to his requirements, would have relished another
prophecy in an earlier work of Ortega's: before things could get
better, the masses must fail completely in their audacious attempt to
rule society, "so that they may learn in their own lacerated flesh
that which they do not wish to hear"; only then would their hatred of
their betters be exhausted, and the mass and the select minority
would once again be integrated into a functioning society.
