Mahagonny com 
 
child.32 The problem for Paul, and therefore for the new ethos which 
he has proposed for Mahagonny', is that he appears only to have 
reached the lion stage of spiritual development. Moreover, the view 
of human nature that he advocates at the end of Scene 11 seems to 
confirm that his ethos is grounded in a predatory egoism reminiscent 
not only of Nietzsche's beast of prey, but also of the political 
philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, where it was the determining 
precondition for the war of all against all. The normative foundations 
of Mahagonny" thus risk exacerbating the anomic depredations of 
modernity, which Mahagonny' was intended to counter, so that in 
dialectical terms Mahagonny" may be no more than a dystopian 
negation of the negation. 
A year after Paul's discovery of the laws of human happiness and 
bliss and the city's subsequent adoption of its new ethos, Mahagonny"

becomes a boom town. Scenes 13 to 16, which depict the social and 
individual realities of Mahagonny" almost in the guise of a medieval

morality play, are permeated by a choral leitmotif emphasizing the 
materialist implications of the new ethos. The focus on basic 
biophysical drives and appetites--eating, sex, aggression--suggests 
an unleashing of the id, whilst the phrase "das steht im Kontrakt"
(BFA 
2, 362) indicates the legal and financial dimensions of the new order. 
Its consequences are devastating. Jakob eats himself to death, Joe is 
killed in a boxing match, love is reduced to conveyor-belt style 
prostitution in a grotesque travesty of the Baroque view of the 
relationship between time and love: "Liebe, die ist doch nicht an Zeit

gebunden / Jungens, mach rasch, denn hier geht's um Sekunden" 
(BFA 2, 363). At one level the presentation of the social relations 
endemic in Mahagonny" could be read     as endorsing the 
conservative social and political theory associated with Freud's later 
writings.33 But it could also be construed as a fundamental critique of 
the radical value-pluralism associated with the "post-modern" ethos

of Mahagonny", which is shown in practice to entail self-destruction

and social disintegration precisely because the appetites of the id, 
whose violent power transcends even that of hurricanes, must be 
subjected to externally imposed normative constraints if the individual 
and society are to survive. As Paul observes in his epiphanic moment: 
Und gerade so ist der Mensch: 
Er muß zerstören, was da ist. 
Wozu braucht's da einen Hurrikan? 
Was ist der Taifun an Schrecken 
Gegen den Menschen, wenn er seinen Spaß will? (BFA 2, 
356) 
Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft. 
The forces of the id are overlaid and impelled by the economic 
structures of Mahagonny" in both the brothel scene and the gambling

associated with the boxing match. The centrality and ubiquity of 
 
312