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

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combatants regards as evil. But before Christ, men did not see

that resistance by force to what each regards as evil, simply

because one thinks evil what the other thinks good, is only one of

the methods of settling the dispute, and that there is another

method, that of not resisting evil by force at all.

 

Before Christ’s teaching, it seemed to men that the one only means

of settling a dispute was by resistance to evil by force. And

they acted accordingly, each of the combatants trying to convince

himself and others that what each respectively regards as evil, is

actually, absolutely evil.

 

And to do this from the earliest time men have devised definitions

of evil and tried to make them binding on everyone. And such

definitions of evil sometimes took the form of laws, supposed to

have been received by supernatural means, sometimes of the

commands of rulers or assemblies to whom infallibility was

attributed. Men resorted to violence against others, and

convinced themselves and others that they were directing their

violence against evil recognized as such by all.

 

This means was employed from the earliest times, especially by

those who had gained possession of authority, and for a long while

its irrationality was not detected.

 

But the longer men lived in the world and the more complex their

relations became, the more evident it was that to resist by force

what each regarded as evil was irrational, that conflict was in no

way lessened thereby, and that no human definitions can succeed in

making what some regard as evil be accepted as such by others.

 

Already at the time Christianity arose, it was evident to a great

number of people in the Roman Empire where it arose, that what was

regarded as evil by Nero and Caligula could not be regarded as

evil by others. Even at that time men had begun to understand

that human laws, though given out for divine laws, were compiled

by men, and cannot be infallible, whatever the external majesty

with which they are invested, and that erring men are not rendered

infallible by assembling together and calling themselves a senate

or any other name. Even at that time this was felt and understood

by many. And it was then that Christ preached his doctrine, which

consisted not only of the prohibition of resistance to evil by

force, but gave a new conception of life and a means of putting an

end to conflict between all men, not by making it the duty of one

section only of mankind to submit without conflict to what is

prescribed to them by certain authorities, but by making it the

duty of all—and consequently of those in authority—not to resort

to force against anyone in any circumstances.

 

This doctrine was accepted at the time by only a very small number

of disciples. The majority of men, especially all who were in

power, even after the nominal acceptance of Christianity,

continued to maintain for themselves the principle of resistance

by force to what they regarded as evil. So it was under the Roman

and Byzantine emperors, and so it continued to be later.

 

The insufficiency of the principle of the authoritative definition

of evil and resistance to it by force, evident as it was in the

early ages of Christianity, becomes still more obvious through the

division of the Roman Empire into many states of equal authority,

through their hostilities and the internal conflicts that broke

out within them.

 

But men were not ready to accept the solution given by Christ, and

the old definitions of evil, which ought to be resisted, continued

to be laid down by means of making laws binding on all and

enforced by forcible means. The authority who decided what ought

to be regarded as evil and resisted by force was at one time the

Pope, at another an emperor or king, an elective assembly or a

whole nation. But both within and without the state there were

always men to be found who did not accept as binding on themselves

the laws given out as the decrees of a god, or made by men

invested with a sacred character, or the institutions supposed to

represent the will of the nation; and there were men who thought

good what the existing authorities regarded as bad, and who

struggled against the authorities with the same violence as was

employed against them.

 

The men invested with religious authority regarded as evil what

the men and institutions invested with temporal authority regarded

as good and vice versa, and the struggle grew more and more

intense. And the longer men used violence as the means of

settling their disputes, the more obvious it became that it was an

unsuitable means, since there could be no external authority able

to define evil recognized by all.

 

Things went on like this for eighteen centuries, and at last

reached the present position in which it is absolutely obvious

that there is, and can be, no external definition of evil binding

upon all. Men have come to the point of ceasing to believe in the

possibility or even desirability of finding and establishing such

a general definition. It has come to men in power ceasing to

attempt to prove that what they regard as evil is evil, and simply

declaring that they regard as evil what they don’t like, while

their subjects no longer obey them because they accept the

definition of evil laid down by them, but simply obey because they

cannot help themselves. It was not because it was a good thing,

necessary and beneficial to men, and the contrary course would

have been an evil, but simply because it was the will of those in

power that Nice was incorporated into France, and Lorraine into

Germany, and Bohemia into Austria, and that Poland was divided,

and Ireland and India ruled by the English government, and that

the Chinese are attacked and the Africans slaughtered, and the

Chinese prevented from immigrating by the Americans, and the Jews

persecuted by the Russians, and that landowners appropriate lands

they do not cultivate and capitalists enjoy the fruits of the

labor of others. It has come to the present state of things; one

set of men commit acts of violence no longer on the pretext of

resistance to evil, but simply for their profit or their caprice,

and another set submit to violence, not because they suppose, as

was supposed in former times, that this violence was practised

upon them for the sake of securing them from evil, but simply

because they cannot avoid it.

 

If the Roman, or the man of mediaeval times, or the average

Russian of fifty years ago, as I remember him, was convinced

without a shade of doubt that the violence of authority was

indispensable to preserve him from evil; that taxes, dues,

serfage, prisons, scourging, knouts, executions, the army and war

were what ought to be—we know now that one can seldom find a man

who believes that all these means of violence preserve anyone from

any evil whatever, and indeed does not clearly perceive that most

of these acts of violence to which he is exposed, and in which he

has some share, are in themselves a great and useless evil.

 

There is no one to-day who does not see the uselessness and

injustice of collecting taxes from the toiling masses to enrich

idle officials; or the senselessness of inflicting punishments on

weak or depraved persons in the shape of transportation from one

place to another, or of imprisonment in a fortress where, living

in security and indolence, they only become weaker and more

depraved; or the worse than uselessness and injustice, the

positive insanity and barbarity of preparations for war and of

wars, causing devastation and ruin, and having no kind of

justification. Yet these forms of violence continue and are

supported by the very people who see their uselessness, injustice,

and cruelty, and suffer from them. If fifty years ago the idle

rich man and the illiterate laborer were both alike convinced that

their state of everlasting holiday for one and everlasting toil

for the other was ordained by God himself, we know very well that

nowadays, thanks to the growth of population and the diffusion of

books and education, it would be hard to find in Europe or even in

Russia, either among rich or poor, a man to whom in one shape or

another a doubt as to the justice of this state of things had

never presented itself. The rich know that they are guilty in the

very fact of being rich, and try to expiate their guilt by

sacrifices to art and science, as of old they expiated their sins

by sacrifices to the Church. And even the larger half of the

working people openly declare that the existing order is

iniquitous and bound to be destroyed or reformed. One set of

religious people of whom there are millions in Russia, the so-called sectaries, consider the existing social order as unjust and

to be destroyed on the ground of the Gospel teaching taken in its

true sense. Others regard it as unjust on the ground of the

socialistic, communistic, or anarchistic theories, which are

springing up in the lower strata of the working people. Violence

no longer rests on the belief in its utility, but only on the fact

of its having existed so long, and being organized by the ruling

classes who profit by it, so that those who are under their

authority cannot extricate themselves from it. The governments of

our day—all of them, the most despotic and the liberal alike—

have become what Herzen so well called “Ghenghis Khan with the

telegraph;” that is to say, organizations of violence based on no

principle but the grossest tyranny, and at the same time taking

advantage of all the means invented by science for the peaceful

collective social activity of free and equal men, used by them to

enslave and oppress their fellows.

 

Governments and the ruling classes no longer take their stand on

right or even on the semblance of justice, but on a skillful

organization carried to such a point of perfection by the aid of

science that everyone is caught in the circle of violence and has

no chance of escaping from it. This circle is made up now of four

methods of working upon men, joined together like the limes of a

chain ring.

 

The first and oldest method is intimidation. This consists in

representing the existing state organization—whatever it may be,

free republic or the most savage despotism—as something sacred

and immutable, and therefore following any efforts to alter it

with the cruellest punishments. This method is in use now—as it

has been from olden times—wherever there is a government: in

Russia against the so-called Nihilists, in America against

Anarchists, in France against Imperialists, Legitimists,

Communards, and Anarchists.

 

Railways, telegraphs, telephones, photographs, and the great

perfection of the means of getting rid of men for years, without

killing them, by solitary confinement, where, hidden from the

world, they perish and are forgotten, and the many other modern

inventions employed by government, give such power that when once

authority has come into certain hands, the police, open and

secret, the administration and prosecutors, jailers and

executioners of all kinds, do their work so zealously that there

is no chance of overturning the government, however cruel and

senseless it may be.

 

The second method is corruption. It consists in plundering the

industrious working people of their wealth by means of taxes and

distributing it in satisfying the greed of officials, who are

bound in return to support and keep up the oppression of the

people. These bought officials, from the highest ministers to the

poorest copying clerks, make up an unbroken network of men bound