The world belongs to those who don’t feel. The essential condition for being a practical man is the absence of sensibility. The chief requisite for the practical expression of life is will, since this leads to action. Two things can thwart action – sensibility and analytic thought, the latter of which is just thought with sensibility. All action is by nature the projection of our personality on to the external world, and since the external world is largely and firstly made up of human beings, it follows that this projection of personality is basically a matter of crossing other people’s path, of hindering, hurting or overpowering them, depending on the form our action takes.

To act, then, requires a certain incapacity for imagining the personalities of others, their joys and sufferings. Sympathy leads to paralysis. The man of action regards the external world as composed exclusively of inert matter – either intrinsically inert, like a stone he walks on or kicks out of his path, or inert like a human being who couldn’t resist him and thus might as well be a stone as a man since, like a stone, he was walked on or kicked out of the way.

The best example of the practical man is the military strategist, in whom extreme concentration of action is joined to its extreme importance. All life is war, and the battle is life’s synthesis. The strategist is a man who plays with lives like the chess player with chess pieces. What would become of the strategist if he thought about how each of his moves brings night to a thousand homes and grief to three thousand hearts? What would become of the world if we were human? If man really felt, there would be no civilization. Art gives shelter to the sensibility that action was obliged to forget. Art is Cinderella, who stayed at home because that’s how it had to be.

Every man of action is basically cheerful and optimistic, because those who don’t feel are happy. You can spot a man of action by the fact he’s never out of sorts. A man who works in spite of being out of sorts is an auxiliary to action. He can be a bookkeeper, as it were, in the vast general scheme of life, as I happen to be in my own particular life, but he cannot be a ruler over things or men. Rulership requires insensibility. Whoever governs is happy, since to be sad one has to feel.

Today my boss, Senhor Vasques, closed a deal that brought a sick man and his family to ruin. As he negotiated the deal he completely forgot that this man existed, except as the opposing commercial party. After the deal was closed, he was touched by sensibility. Only afterwards, of course, since otherwise the deal would never have been made. ‘I feel sorry for the fellow,’ he told me. ‘He’s going to wind up being destitute.’ Then, lighting up a cigar, he added: ‘Well, if he needs anything from me’ – meaning some kind of charity – ‘I won’t forget that I have him to thank for a good business deal and a few thousand escudos.’ Senhor Vasques isn’t a crook; he’s a man of action. The loser in this game can indeed count on my boss’s charity in the future, for he’s a generous man.

Senhor Vasques is like all men of action, be they business leaders, industrialists, politicians, military commanders, social and religious idealists, great poets, great artists, beautiful women, or children who do what they please. The one who ordains is the one who doesn’t feel. The one who succeeds is the one who thinks only of what is needed for success. The remaining general lot of humanity – amorphous, sensitive, imaginative and fragile – is no more than the backdrop against which these stage actors perform until the puppet show ends, no more than the flat and lifeless chess board over which the pieces move until they’re put away by the Great Player, who, fooling himself with a double personality, plays against his own person* and is always entertained.