Leo Tolstoy Archive
Written: 1908
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
‘We live in an age of discipline, culture and civilization, but it is still far from being a moral age. Under the present conditions people can say that the happiness of the State grows alongside the misery of the people. And there remains the question of whether we might not be happier living in a primitive condition where we would have none of our present culture.
For how can one make people happy without making them moral and good?’ (Kant)
Try to live in such a way that you have no need of violence.
We are very accustomed to arguing about how we might organize the lives of others, of humanity as a whole. And we find nothing strange in such deliberations. Whereas these sort of arguments could never exist between religious, and thereby free people. These arguments are the very results of despotism or the domination of one, or a few, over many.
This is how both despots and those perverted by them reason.
This mistake is harmful, not only because it torments and perverts those people beneath the despot’s control, but because the awareness of the necessity of reforming oneself diminishes in all men, whereas it is the only true method of influencing others. Not only has one man no right to give orders to a number of men, but neither have a number of men the right to give orders to one.’ (V. Chertkov)
‘Yes, but what form would human existence take without a government?’ ask people, who evidently think that we always know what form life will take, and in what form it will continue, and that those who have decided to live without a government must, therefore, know beforehand the form life will take. But really, we have never known and can never know what shape the future will take. The conviction that men can know and can even arrange the form of the future is really a very primitive, albeit old and widespread, superstition. Regardless of whether or not people should submit to the government, the fact is they have never known and do not and cannot know the form their lives will take. Still less can a minority organize the lives of the rest as they please, since life never shapes itself according to the will of a few, but rather according to many complex reasons, independent of the will of any minority; the most important reason being the moral and religious condition of the majority of people within society.
The superstition that some people can not only know in advance the form that the lives of others, the majority, will take, but can also arrange this future existence, has arisen and is maintained by the wish of those exerting violence to justify their activity, and by the wish of those suffering from the violence to clarify and ease the burden of the violence they experience. Those who commit violence convince themselves, and others, that they know what must be done in order for people’s lives to assume that form they consider best. And the people who suffer the violence will, until they have the strength to overthrow it, believe this, because it is only such a belief that gives some kind of meaning to their predicament.
One would think history should have destroyed this superstition entirely.
At the end of the eighteenth century a few Frenchmen maintained a despotic, monarchical structure through violence, but despite all their efforts, this structure was destroyed and replaced by a Republic. In just the same way, despite all the efforts of the Republican leaders to maintain the system, and albeit with the utmost violence, the Napoleonic Empire replaced the Republic; this in turn was replaced, against the will of its leaders, by a coalition government and not an hereditary empire. And so it went on: Charles X, a constitution, another revolution, another republic to be replaced by Louis Philippe and so on, up until the present Republic. And the same thing has occurred in all coercive human activities. All the efforts of the papacy, far from annihilating the possibility of Protestantism, provoke it. All the efforts of capitalism only strengthen the Socialist tendencies. If a political system established by force is maintained for a certain length of time, or is altered by force, it is only because at the given time certain forms ceased to be pertinent to the general condition, and more importantly to the spiritual condition of the people, and not because someone has upheld them or reconstructed them.
And so the belief that some people, the minority, can arrange the lives of the majority – a thing that is regarded as the most indisputable truth in the name of which the greatest crimes are committed – is only a superstition. The activity founded on this superstition, the political activities of the revolutionaries as well as the rulers and their assistants, generally regarded as a most honorable and important matter, is really a most futile, and moreover harmful, human occupation and has been and still is the greatest hindrance to achieving the true well-being of humanity. Rivers of blood have been shed and are being shed in the name of this superstition, and inestimable suffering has been, and is being, endured by people on account of the ridiculous and harmful activities resulting from this superstition. And, worst of all, while rivers of blood have been and are being shed in the name of this superstition, it is precisely this that forms the greatest obstacle to society’s successful creation of those particular improvements in life appropriate to our time, and to the level of development reached by human consciousness. The superstition prevents genuine progress, chiefly because people, under the pretext of preserving and strengthening, or altering and improving, social conditions, put all their energy into influencing other people, thus neglecting their own inner task of self-perfection, which alone can enhance a change in the structure of society as a whole.
Human life in its totality advances and cannot help moving forward towards the eternal ideal of perfection, only if each individual person advances towards his own, personal and unrestricted perfection.
What a frightening, destructive superstition this is, under the influence of which people ignore their inner duty, which is the only thing really necessary for their own and society’s well-being, and the only thing genuinely within their power, and direct all their efforts towards arranging the lives of others (something beyond their power). And in order to attain this impossible goal they employ violent means that are certainly as harmful to themselves as to others, and which most surely alienate them from both personal and general perfection!