The Kingdom of God Is Within You - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (best non fiction books of all time txt) 📗
- Author: Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
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Under the influence of this intoxication, men imagine themselves
no longer simply men as they are, but some special beings—
noblemen, merchants, governors, judges, officers, tzars,
ministers, or soldiers—no longer bound by ordinary human duties,
but by other duties far more weighty—the peculiar duties of a
nobleman, merchant, governor, judge, officer, tzar, minister, or
soldier.
Thus the landowner, who claimed the forest, acted as he did only
because he fancied himself not a simple man, having the same
rights to life as the peasants living beside him and everyone
else, but a great landowner, a member of the nobility, and under
the influence of the intoxication of power he felt his dignity
offended by the peasants’ claims. It was only through this
feeling that, without considering the consequences that might
follow, he sent in a claim to be reinstated in his pretended
rights.
In the same way the judges, who wrongfully adjudged the forest to
the proprietor, did so simply because they fancied themselves not
simply men like everyone else, and so bound to be guided in
everything only by what they consider right, but, under the
intoxicating influence of power, imagined themselves the
representatives of the justice which cannot err; while under the
intoxicating influence of servility they imagined themselves bound
to carry out to the letter the instructions inscribed in a certain
book, the so-called law. In the same way all who take part in
such an affair, from the highest representative of authority who
signs his assent to the report, from the superintendent presiding
at the recruiting sessions, and the priest who deludes the
recruits, to the lowest soldier who is ready now to fire on his
own brothers, imagine, in the intoxication of power or of
servility, that they are some conventional characters. They do
not face the question that is presented to them, whether or not
they ought to take part in what their conscience judges an evil
act, but fancy themselves various conventional personages—one as
the Tzar, God’s anointed, an exceptional being, called to watch
over the happiness of one hundred millions of men; another as the
representative of nobility; another as a priest, who has received
special grace by his ordination; another as a soldier, bound by
his military oath to carry out all he is commanded without
reflection.
Only under the intoxication of the power or the servility of their
imagined positions could all these people act as they do.
Were not they all firmly convinced that their respective vocations
of tzar, minister, governor, judge, nobleman, landowner,
superintendent, officer, and soldier are something real and
important, not one of them would even think without horror and
aversion of taking part in what they do now.
The conventional positions, established hundreds of years,
recognized for centuries and by everyone, distinguished by special
names and dresses, and, moreover, confirmed by every kind of
solemnity, have so penetrated into men’s minds through their
senses, that, forgetting the ordinary conditions of life common to
all, they look at themselves and everyone only from this
conventional point of view, and are guided in their estimation of
their own actions and those of others by this conventional
standard.
Thus we see a man of perfect sanity and ripe age, simply because
he is decked out with some fringe, or embroidered keys on his coat
tails, or a colored ribbon only fit for some gayly dressed girl,
and is told that he is a general, a chamberlain, a knight of the
order of St. Andrew, or some similar nonsense, suddenly become
self-important, proud, and even happy, or, on the contrary, grow
melancholy and unhappy to the point of falling ill, because he has
failed to obtain the expected decoration or title. Or what is
still more striking, a young man, perfectly sane in every other
matter, independent and beyond the fear of want, simply because he
has been appointed judicial prosecutor or district commander,
separates a poor widow from her little children, and shuts her up
in prison, leaving her children uncared for, all because the
unhappy woman carried on a secret trade in spirits, and so
deprived the revenue of twenty-five rubles, and he does not feel
the least pang of remorse. Or what is still more amazing; a man,
otherwise sensible and good-hearted, simply because he is given a
badge or a uniform to wear, and told that he is a guard or customs
officer, is ready to fire on people, and neither he nor those
around him regard him as to blame for it, but, on the contrary,
would regard him as to blame if he did not fire. To say nothing
of judges and juries who condemn men to death, and soldiers who
kill men by thousands without the slightest scruple merely because
it has been instilled into them that they are not simply men, but
jurors, judges, generals, and soldiers.
This strange and abnormal condition of men under state
organization is usually expressed in the following words: “As a
man, I pity him; but as guard, judge, general, governor, tzar, or
soldier, it is my duty to kill or torture him.” Just as though
there were some positions conferred and recognized, which would
exonerate us from the obligations laid on each of us by the fact
of our common humanity.
So, for example, in the case before us, men are going to murder
and torture the famishing, and they admit that in the dispute
between the peasants and the landowner the peasants are right (all
those in command said as much to me). They know that the peasants
are wretched, poor, and hungry, and the landowner is rich and
inspires no sympathy. Yet they are all going to kill the peasants
to secure three thousand rubles for the landowner, only because at
that moment they fancy themselves not men but governor, official,
general of police, officer, and soldier, respectively, and
consider themselves bound to obey, not the eternal demands of the
conscience of man, but the casual, temporary demands of their
positions as officers or soldiers.
Strange as it may seem, the sole explanation of this astonishing
phenomenon is that they are in the condition of the hypnotized,
who, they say, feel and act like the creatures they are commanded
by the hypnotizer to represent. When, for instance, it is
suggested to the hypnotized subject that he is lame, he begins to
walk lame, that he is blind, and he cannot see, that he is a wild
beast, and he begins to bite. This is the state, not only of
those who were going on this expedition, but of all men who
fulfill their state and social duties in preference to and in
detriment of their human duties.
The essence of this state is that under the influence of one
suggestion they lose the power of criticising their actions, and
therefore do, without thinking, everything consistent with the
suggestion to which they are led by example, precept, or
insinuation.
The difference between those hypnotized by scientific men and
those under the influence of the state hypnotism, is that an
imaginary position is suggested to the former suddenly by one
person in a very brief space of time, and so the hypnotized state
appears to us in a striking and surprising form, while the
imaginary position suggested by state influence is induced slowly,
little by little, imperceptibly from childhood, sometimes during
years, or even generations, and not in one person alone but in a
whole society.
“But,” it will be said,” at all times, in all societies, the
majority of persons—all the children, all the women absorbed in
the bearing and rearing of the young, all the great mass of the
laboring population, who are under the necessity of incessant and
fatiguing physical labor, all those of weak character by nature,
all those who are abnormally enfeebled intellectually by the
effects of nicotine, alcohol, opium, or other intoxicants—are
always in a condition of incapacity for independent thought, and
are either in subjection to those who are on a higher intellectual
level, or else under the influence of family or social traditions,
of what is called public opinion, and there is nothing unnatural
or incongruous in their subjection.”
And truly there is nothing unnatural in it, and the tendency of
men of small intellectual power to follow the lead of those on a
higher level of intelligence is a constant law, and it is owing to
it that men can live in societies and on the same principles at
all. The minority consciously adopt certain rational principles
through their correspondence with reason, while the majority act
on the same principles unconsciously because it is required by
public opinion.
Such subjection to public opinion on the part of the
unintellectual does not assume an unnatural character till the
public opinion is split into two.
But there are times when a higher truth, revealed at first to a
few persons, gradually gains ground till it has taken hold of such
a number of persons that the old public opinion, founded on a
lower order of truths, begins to totter and the new is ready to
take its place, but has not yet been firmly established. It is
like the spring, this time of transition, when the old order of
ideas has not quite broken up and the new has not quite gained a
footing. Men begin to criticise their actions in the light of the
new truth, but in the meantime in practice, through inertia and
tradition, they continue to follow the principles which once
represented the highest point of rational consciousness, but are
now in flagrant contradiction with it.
Then men are in an abnormal, wavering condition, feeling the
necessity of following the new ideal, and yet not bold enough to
break with the old-established traditions.
Such is the attitude in regard to the truth of Christianity not
only of the men in the Toula train, but of the majority of men of
our times, alike of the higher and the lower orders.
Those of the ruling classes, having no longer any reasonable
justification for the profitable positions they occupy, are
forced, in order to keep them, to stifle their higher rational
faculty of loving, and to persuade themselves that their positions
are indispensable. And those of the lower classes, exhausted by
toil and brutalized of set purpose, are kept in a permanent
deception, practiced deliberately and continuously by the higher
classes upon them.
Only in this way can one explain the amazing contradictions with
which our life is full, and of which a striking example was
presented to me by the expedition I met on the 9th of September;
good, peaceful men, known to me personally, going with untroubled
tranquillity to perpetrate the most beastly, senseless, and vile
of crimes. Had not they some means of stifling their conscience,
not one of them would be capable of committing a hundredth part of
such a villainy.
It is not that they have not a conscience which forbids them from
acting thus, just as, even three or four hundred years ago, when
people burnt men at the stake and put them to the rack they had a
conscience which prohibited it; the conscience is there, but it
has been put to sleep—in those in command by what the
psychologists call auto-suggestion; in the soldiers, by the direct
conscious hypnotizing exerted by the higher classes.
Though asleep, the conscience is there, and in spite of the
hypnotism it is already speaking in them, and it may awake.
All these men are in a position like that of a man under
hypnotism, commanded to do something opposed to everything he
regards as good and rational, such as to kill his mother or his
child. The hypnotized subject feels himself
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