The Kingdom of God Is Within You - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (best non fiction books of all time txt) 📗

are terrible, hideous, in their moral

perversion. The others, at least, say that they hate evil, and

love good, but these openly declare that good and evil do not

exist.

 

All discussion of the possibility of re-establishing peace instead

of everlasting war—is the pernicious sentimentality of

phrasemongers. There is a law of evolution by which it follows

that I must live and act in an evil way; what is to be done? I am

an educated man, I know the law of evolution, and therefore I will

act in an evil way. “ENTRONS AU PALAIS DE LA GUERRE.” There is

the law of evolution, and therefore there is neither good nor

evil, and one must live for the sake of one’s personal existence,

leaving the rest to the action of the law of evolution. This is

the last word of refined culture, and with it, of that

overshadowing of conscience which has come upon the educated

classes of our times. The desire of the educated classes to

support the ideas they prefer, and the order of existence based on

them, has attained its furthest limits. They lie, and delude

themselves, and one another, with the subtlest forms of deception,

simply to obscure, to deaden conscience.

 

Instead of transforming their life into harmony with their

conscience, they try by every means to stifle its voice. But

it is in darkness that the light begins to shine, and so the

light is rising upon our epoch.

 

CHAPTER VII.

 

SIGNIFICANCE OF COMPULSORY SERVICE.

 

Universal Compulsory Service is not a Political Accident, but the

Furthest Limit of the Contradiction Inherent in the Social

Conception of Life—Origin of Authority in Society—Basis of

Authority is Physical Violence—To be Able to Perform its Acts

of Violence Authority Needs a Special Organization—The Army—

Authority, that is, Violence, is the Principle which is

Destroying the Social Conception of Life—Attitude of Authority

to the Masses, that is, Attitude of Government to Working

Oppressed Classes—Governments Try to Foster in Working Classes

the Idea that State Force is Necessary to Defend Them from

External Enemies—But the Army is Principally Needed to Preserve

Government from its own Subjects—The Working Classes—Speech of

M. de Caprivi—All Privileges of Ruling Classes Based on

Violence—The Increase of Armies up to Point of Universal

Service—Universal Compulsory Service Destroys all the

Advantages of Social Life, which Government is Intended to

Preserve—Compulsory Service is the Furthest Limit of

Submission, since in Name of the State it Requires Sacrifice of

all that can be Precious to a Man—Is Government Necessary?—The

Sacrifices Demanded by Government in Compulsory Service have No

Longer any Reasonable Basis—And there is More Advantage to be

Gained by not Submitting to the Demands of the State than by

Submitting to Them.

 

Educated people of the upper classes are trying to stifle the

ever-growing sense of the necessity of transforming the existing

social order. But life, which goes on growing more complex, and

developing in the same direction, and increases the

inconsistencies and the sufferings of men, brings them to the

limit beyond which they cannot go. This furthest limit of

inconsistency is universal compulsory military service.

 

It is usually supposed that universal military service and the

increased armaments connected with it, as well as the resulting

increase of taxes and national debts, are a passing phenomenon,

produced by the particular political situation of Europe, and that

it may be removed by certain political combinations without any

modification of the inner order of life.

 

This is absolutely incorrect. Universal military service is only

the internal inconsistency inherent in the social conception of

life, carried to its furthest limits, and becoming evident when a

certain stage of material development is reached.

 

The social conception of life, we have seen, consists in the

transfer of the aim of life from the individual to groups and

their maintenance—to the tribe, family, race, or state.

 

In the social conception of life it is supposed that since the aim

of life is found in groups of individuals, individuals will

voluntarily sacrifice their own interests for the interests of the

group. And so it has been, and still is, in fact, in certain

groups, the distinction being that they are the most primitive

forms of association in the family or tribe or race, or even in

the patriarchal state. Through tradition handed down by education

and supported by religious sentiment, individuals without

compulsion merged their interests in the interest of the group and

sacrificed their own good for the general welfare.

 

But the more complex and the larger societies become, and

especially the more often conquest becomes the cause of the

amalgamation of people into a state, the more often individuals

strive to attain their own aims at the public expense, and the

more often it becomes necessary to restrain these insubordinate

individuals by recourse to authority, that is, to violence. The

champions of the social conception of life usually try to connect

the idea of authority, that is, of violence, with the idea of

moral influence, but this connection is quite impossible.

 

The effect of moral influence on a man is to change his desires

and to bend them in the direction of the duty required of him.

The man who is controlled by moral influence acts in accordance

with his own desires. Authority, in the sense in which the word

is ordinarily understood, is a means of forcing a man to act in

opposition to his desires. The man who submits to authority does

not do as he chooses but as he is obliged by authority. Nothing

can oblige a man to do what he does not choose except physical

force, or the threat of it, that is—deprivation of freedom,

blows, imprisonment, or threats—easily carried out—of such

punishments. This is what authority consists of and always has

consisted of.

 

In spite of the unceasing efforts of those who happen to be in

authority to conceal this and attribute some other significance to

it, authority has always meant for man the cord, the chain with

which he is bound and fettered, or the knout with which he is to

be flogged, or the ax with which he is to have hands, ears, nose,

or head cut off, or at the very least, the threat of these

terrors. So it was under Nero and Ghenghis Khan, and so it is

to-day, even under the most liberal government in the Republics of

the United States or of France. If men submit to authority, it is

only because they are liable to these punishments in case of non-submission. All state obligations, payment of taxes, fulfillment

of state duties, and submission to punishments, exile, fines,

etc., to which people appear to submit voluntarily, are always

based on bodily violence or the threat of it.

 

The basis of authority is bodily violence. The possibility of

applying bodily violence to people is provided above all by an

organization of armed men, trained to act in unison in submission

to one will. These bands of armed men, submissive to a single

will, are what constitute the army. The army has always been and

still is the basis of power. Power is always in the hands of

those who control the army, and all men in power—from the Roman

Caesars to the Russian and German Emperors—take more interest in

their army than in anything, and court popularity in the army,

knowing that if that is on their side their power is secure.

 

The formation and aggrandizement of the army, indispensable to the

maintenance of authority, is what has introduced into the social

conception of life the principle that is destroying it.

 

The object of authority and the justification for its existence

lie in the restraint of those who aim at attaining their personal

interests to the detriment of the interests of society.

 

But however power has been gained, those who possess it are in no

way different from other men, and therefore no more disposed than

others to subordinate their own interests to those of the society.

On the contrary, having the power to do so at their disposal, they

are more disposed than others to subordinate the public interests

to their own. Whatever means men have devised for preventing

those in authority from overriding public interests for their own

benefit, or for intrusting power only to the most faultless

people, they have not so far succeeded in either of those aims.

 

All the methods of appointing authorities that have been tried,

divine right, and election, and heredity, and balloting, and

assemblies and parliaments and senate—have all proved

ineffectual. Everyone knows that not one of these methods attains

the aim either of intrusting power only to the incorruptible, or

of preventing power from being abused. Everyone knows on the

contrary that men in authority—be they emperors, ministers,

governors, or police officers—are always, simply from the

possession of power, more liable to be demoralized, that is, to

subordinate public interests to their personal aims than those who

have not the power to do so. Indeed, it could not be otherwise.

 

The state conception of life could be justified only so long as

all men voluntarily sacrificed their personal interests to the

public welfare. But so soon as there were individuals who would

not voluntarily sacrifice their own interests, and authority, that

is, violence, was needed to restrain them, then the disintegrating

principle of the coercion of one set of people by another set

entered into the social conception of the organization based on

it.

 

For the authority of one set of men over another to attain its

object of restraining those who override public interests for

their personal ends, power ought only to be put into the hands of

the impeccable, as it is supposed to be among the Chinese, and as

it was supposed to be in the Middle Ages, and is even now supposed

to be by those who believe in the consecration by anointing. Only

under those conditions could the social organization be justified.

 

But since this is not the case, and on the contrary men in power

are always far from being saints, through the very fact of their

possession of power, the social organization based on power has no

justification.

 

Even if there was once a time when, owing to the low standard of

morals, and the disposition of men to violence, the existence of

an authority to restrain such violence was an advantage, because

the violence of government was less than the violence of

individuals, one cannot but see that this advantage could not be

lasting. As the disposition of individuals to violence

diminished, and as the habits of the people became more civilized,

and as power grew more social organization demoralized through

lack of restraint, this advantage disappeared.

 

The whole history of the last two thousand years is nothing but

the history of this gradual change of relation between the moral

development of the masses on the one hand and the demoralization

of governments on the other.

 

This, put simply, is how it has come to pass.

 

Men lived in families, tribes, and races, at feud with one

another, plundering, outraging, and killing one another. These

violent hostilities were carried on on a large and on a small

scale: man against man, family against family, tribe against

tribe, race against race, and people against people. The larger

and stronger groups conquered and absorbed the weaker, and the

larger and stronger they became, the more internal feuds

disappeared and the more the continuity of the group seemed

assured.

 

The members of a family or tribe, united into one community, are

less hostile among themselves, and families and tribes do not die

like one man, but have a continuity of existence. Between the

members of one state, subject to a single authority, the strife

between individuals seems still less and the life