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

class="calibre1">together by the same interest—that of living at the expense of

the people. They become the richer the more submissively they

carry out the will of the government; and at all times and places,

sticking at nothing, in all departments support by word and deed

the violence of government, on which their own prosperity also

rests.

 

The third method is what I can only describe as hypnotizing the

people. This consists in checking the moral development of men,

and by various suggestions keeping them back in the ideal of life,

outgrown by mankind at large, on which the power of government

rests. This hypnotizing process is organized at the present in the

most complex manner, and starting from their earliest childhood,

continues to act on men till the day of their death. It begins in

their earliest years in the compulsory schools, created for this

purpose, in which the children have instilled into them the ideas

of life of their ancestors, which are in direct antagonism with

the conscience of the modern world. In countries where there is a

state religion, they teach the children the senseless blasphemies

of the Church catechisms, together with the duty of obedience to

their superiors. In republican states they teach them the savage

superstition of patriotism and the same pretended obedience to the

governing authorities.

 

The process is kept up during later years by the encouragement of

religious and patriotic superstitions.

 

The religious superstition is encouraged by establishing, with

money taken from the people, temples, processions, memorials, and

festivals, which, aided by painting, architecture, music, and

incense, intoxicate the people, and above all by the support of

the clergy, whose duty consists in brutalizing the people and

keeping them in a permanent state of stupefaction by their

teaching, the solemnity of their services, their sermons, and

their interference in private life—at births, deaths, and

marriages. The patriotic superstition is encouraged by the

creation, with money taken from the people, of national f�tes,

spectacles, monuments, and festivals to dispose men to attach

importance to their own nation, and to the aggrandizement of the

state and its rulers, and to feel antagonism and even hatred for

other nations. With these objects under despotic governments there

is direct prohibition against printing and disseminating books to

enlighten the people, and everyone who might rouse the people from

their lethargy is exiled or imprisoned. Moreover, under every

government without exception everything is kept back that might

emancipate and everything encouraged that tends to corrupt the

people, such as literary works tending to keep them in the

barbarism of religious and patriotic superstition, all kinds of

sensual amusements, spectacles, circuses, theaters, and even the

physical means of inducing stupefaction, as tobacco and alcohol,

which form the principal source of revenue of states. Even

prostitution is encouraged, and not only recognized, but even

organized by the government in the majority of states. So much for

the third method.

 

The fourth method consists in selecting from all the men who have

been stupefied and enslaved by the three former methods a certain

number, exposing them to special and intensified means of

stupefaction and brutalization, and so making them into a passive

instrument for carrying out all the cruelties and brutalities

needed by the government. This result is attained by taking them

at the youthful age when men have not had time to form clear and

definite principles of morals, and removing them from all natural

and human conditions of life, home, family and kindred, and useful

labor. They are shut up together in barracks, dressed in special

clothes, and worked upon by cries, drums, music, and shining

objects to go through certain daily actions invented for this

purpose, and by this means are brought into an hypnotic condition

in which they cease to be men and become mere senseless machines,

submissive to the hypnotizer. These physically vigorous young men

(in these days of universal conscription, all young men),

hypnotized, armed with murderous weapons, always obedient to the

governing authorities and ready for any act of violence at their

command, constitute the fourth and principal method of enslaving

men.

 

By this method the circle of violence is completed.

 

Intimidation, corruption, and hypnotizing bring people into a

condition in which they are willing to be soldiers; the soldiers

give the power of punishing and plundering them (and purchasing

officials with the spoils), and hypnotizing them and converting

them in time into these same soldiers again.

 

The circle is complete, and there is no chance of breaking through

it by force.

 

Some persons maintain that freedom from violence, or at least a

great diminution of it, may be gained by the oppressed forcibly

overturning the oppressive government and replacing it by a new

one under which such violence and oppression will be unnecessary,

but they deceive themselves and others, and their efforts do not

better the position of the oppressed, but only make it worse.

Their conduct only tends to increase the despotism of government.

Their efforts only afford a plausible pretext for government to

strengthen their power.

 

Even if we admit that under a combination of circumstances

specially unfavorable for the government, as in France in 1870,

any government might be forcibly overturned and the power

transferred to other hands, the new authority would rarely be less

oppressive than the old one; on the contrary, always having to

defend itself against its dispossessed and exasperated enemies, it

would be more despotic and cruel, as has always been the rule in

all revolutions.

 

While socialists and communists regard the individualistic,

capitalistic organization of society as an evil, and the

anarchists regard as an evil all government whatever, there are

royalists, conservatives, and capitalists who consider any

socialistic or communistic organization or anarchy as an evil, and

all these parties have no means other than violence to bring men

to agreement. Whichever of these parties were successful in

bringing their schemes to pass, must resort to support its

authority to all the existing methods of violence, and even invent

new ones.

 

The oppressed would be another set of people, and coercion would

take some new form; but the violence and oppression would be

unchanged or even more cruel, since hatred would be intensified by

the struggle, and new forms of oppression would have been devised.

So it has always been after all revolutions and all attempts at

revolution, all conspiracies, and all violent changes of

government. Every conflict only strengthens the means of

oppression in the hands of those who happen at a given moment to

be in power.

 

The position of our Christian society, and especially the ideals

most current in it, prove this in a strikingly convincing way.

 

There remains now only one sphere of human life not encroached

upon by government authority—that is the domestic, economic

sphere, the sphere of private life and labor. And even this is

now—thanks to the efforts of communists and socialists—being

gradually encroached upon by government, so that labor and

recreation, dwellings, dress, and food will gradually, if the

hopes of the reformers are successful, be prescribed and regulated

by government.

 

The slow progress of eighteen centuries has brought the Christian

nations again to the necessity of deciding the question they have

evaded—the question of the acceptance or non-acceptance of

Christ’s teaching, and the question following upon it in social

life of resistance or nonresistance to evil by force. But there

is this difference, that whereas formerly men could accept or

refuse to accept the solution given by Christ, now that solution

cannot be avoided, since it alone can save men from the slavery in

which they are caught like a net.

 

But it is not only the misery of the position which makes this

inevitable.

 

While the pagan organization has been proved more and more false,

the truth of the Christian religion has been growing more and more

evident.

 

Not in vain have the best men of Christian humanity, who

apprehended the truth by spiritual intuition, for eighteen

centuries testified to it in spite of every menace, every

privation, and every suffering. By their martyrdom they passed on

the truth to the masses, and impressed it on their hearts.

 

Christianity has penetrated into the consciousness of humanity,

not only negatively by the demonstration of the impossibility of

continuing in the pagan life, but also through its simplification,

its increased clearness and freedom from the superstitions

intermingled with it, and its diffusion through all classes of the

population.

 

Eighteen centuries of Christianity have not passed without an

effect even on those who accepted it only externally. These

eighteen centuries have brought men so far that even while they

continue to live the pagan life which is no longer consistent with

the development of humanity, they not only see clearly all the

wretchedness of their position, but in the depths of their souls

they believe (they can only live through this belief) that the

only salvation from this position is to be found in fulfilling the

Christian doctrine in its true significance. As to the time and

manner of salvation, opinions are divided according to the

intellectual development and the prejudices of each society. But

every man of the modern world recognizes that our salvation lies

in fulfilling the law of Christ. Some believers in the

supernatural character of Christianity hold that salvation will

come when all men are brought to believe in Christ, whose second

coming is at hand. Other believers in supernatural Christianity

hold that salvation will come through the Church, which will draw

all men into its fold, train them in the Christian virtues, and

transform their life. A third section, who do not admit the

divinity of Christ, hold that the salvation of mankind will be

brought about by slow and gradual progress, through which the

pagan principles of our existence will be replaced by the

principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity—that is, by

Christian principles. A fourth section, who believe in the social

revolution, hold that salvation will come when through a violent

revolution men are forced into community of property, abolition of

government, and collective instead of individual industry—that is

to say, the realization of one side of the Christian doctrine. In

one way or another all men of our day in their inner consciousness

condemn the existing effete pagan order, and admit, often

unconsciously and while regarding themselves as hostile to

Christianity, that our salvation is only to be found in the

application of the Christian doctrine, or parts of it, in its true

significance to our daily life.

 

Christianity cannot, as its Founder said, be realized by the

majority of men all at once; it must grow like a huge tree from a

tiny seed. And so it has grown, and now has reached its full

development, not yet in actual life, but in the conscience of men

of to-day.

 

Now not only the minority, who have always comprehended

Christianity by spiritual intuition, but all the vast majority who

seem so far from it in their social existence recognize its true

significance.

 

Look at individual men in their private life, listen to their

standards of conduct in their judgment of one another; hear not

only their public utterances, but the counsels given by parents

and guardians to the young in their charge; and you will see that,

far as their social life based on violence may be from realizing

Christian truth, in their private life what is considered good by

all without exception is nothing but the Christian virtues; what

is considered as bad is nothing but the antichristian vices. Those

who consecrate their lives self-sacrificingly to the service of

humanity are regarded as the best men. The selfish, who make use

of the misfortunes of others for their own advantage, are regarded

as the worst of men.

 

Though some non-Christian ideals, such as strength, courage, and

wealth,