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

of

Christian truth on the part of each individual man.

 

And, therefore, one would have thought that the efforts of all men

of the present day who profess to wish to work for the welfare of

humanity would have been directed to strengthening this

consciousness of Christian truth in themselves and others.

 

But, strange to say, it is precisely those people who profess most

anxiety for the amelioration of human life, and are regarded as

the leaders of public opinion, who assert that there is no need to

do that, and that there are other more effective means for the

amelioration of men’s condition. They affirm that the

amelioration of human life is effected not by the efforts of

individual men, to recognize and propagate the truth, but by the

gradual modification of the general conditions of life, and that

therefore the efforts of individuals should be directed to the

gradual modification of external conditions for the better. For

every advocacy of a truth inconsistent with the existing order by

an individual is, they maintain, not only useless but injurious,

since in provokes coercive measures on the part of the

authorities, restricting these individuals from continuing any

action useful to society. According to this doctrine all

modifications in human life are brought about by precisely the

same laws as in the life of the animals.

 

So that, according to this doctrine, all the founders of

religions, such as Moses and the prophets, Confucius, Lao-Tse,

Buddha, Christ, and others, preached their doctrines and their

followers accepted them, not because they loved the truth, but

because the political, social, and above all economic conditions

of the peoples among whom these religions arose were favorable for

their origination and development.

 

And therefore the chief efforts of the man who wishes to serve

society and improve the condition of humanity ought, according to

this doctrine, to be directed not to the elucidation and

propagation of truth, but to the improvement of the external

political, social, and above all economic conditions. And the

modification of these conditions is partly effected by serving the

government and introducing liberal and progressive principles into

it, partly in promoting the development of industry and the

propagation of socialistic ideas, and most of all by the diffusion

of science. According to this theory it is of no consequence

whether you profess the truth revealed to you, and therefore

realize it in your life, or at least refrain from committing

actions opposed to the truth, such as serving the government and

strengthening its authority when you regard it as injurious,

profiting by the capitalistic system when you regard it as wrong,

showing veneration for various ceremonies which you believe to be

degrading superstitions, giving support to the law when you

believe it to be founded on error, serving as a soldier, taking

oaths, and lying, and lowering yourself generally. It is useless

to refrain from all that; what is of use is not altering the

existing forms of life, but submitting to them against your own

convictions, introducing liberalism into the existing

institutions, promoting commerce, the propaganda of socialism, and

the triumphs of what is called science, and the diffusion of

education. According to this theory one can remain a landowner,

merchant, manufacturer, judge, official in government pay, officer

or soldier, and still be not only a humane man, but even a

socialist and revolutionist.

 

Hypocrisy, which had formerly only a religious basis in the

doctrine of original sin, the redemption, and the Church, has in

our day gained a new scientific basis and has consequently caught

in its nets all those who had reached too high a stage of

development to be able to find support in religious hypocrisy. So

that while in former days a man who professed the religion of the

Church could take part in all the crimes of the state, and profit

by them, and still regard himself as free from any taint of sin,

so long as he fulfilled the external observances of his creed,

nowadays all who do not believe in the Christianity of the Church,

find similar well-founded irrefutable reasons in science for

regarding themselves as blameless and even highly moral in spite

of their participation in the misdeeds of government and the

advantages they gain from them.

 

A rich landowner—not only in Russia, but in France, England,

Germany, or America—lives on the rents exacted; from the people

living on his land, and robs these generally poverty-stricken

people of all he can get from them. This man’s right of property

in the land rests on the fact that at every effort on the part of

the oppressed people, without his consent, to make use of the land

he considers his, troops are called out to subject them to

punishment and murder. One would have thought that it was obvious

that a man living in this way was an evil, egoistic creature and

could not possibly consider himself a Christian or a liberal. One

would have supposed it evident that the first thing such a man

must do, if he wishes to approximate to Christianity or

liberalism, would be to cease to plunder and ruin men by means of

acts of state violence in support of his claim to the land. And

so it would be if it were not for the logic of hypocrisy, which

reasons that from a religious point of view possession or non-possession of land is of no consequence for salvation, and from

the scientific point of view, giving up the ownership of land is a

useless individual renunciation, and that the welfare of mankind

is not promoted in that way, but by a gradual modification of

external forms. And so we see this man, without the least trouble

of mind or doubt that people will believe in his sincerity,

organizing an agricultural exhibition, or a temperance society, or

sending some soup and stockings by his wife or children to three

old women, and boldly in his family, in drawing rooms, in

committees, and in the press, advocating the Gospel or

humanitarian doctrine of love for one’s neighbor in general and

the agricultural laboring population in particular whom he is

continually exploiting and oppressing. And other people who are

in the same position as he believe him, commend him, and solemnly

discuss with him measures for ameliorating the condition of the

working-class, on whose exploitation their whole life rests,

devising all kinds of possible methods for this, except the one

without which all improvement of their condition is impossible,

i. e., refraining from taking from them the land necessary for

their subsistence. (A striking example of this hypocrisy was the

solicitude displayed by the Russian landowners last year, their

efforts to combat the famine which they had caused, and by which

they profited, selling not only bread at the highest price, but

even potato haulm at five rubles the dessiatine (about 2 and four-fifths acres) for fuel to the freezing peasants.)

 

Or take a merchant whose whole trade—like all trade indeed—is

founded on a series of trickery, by means of which, profiting by

the ignorance or need of others, he buys goods below their value

and sells them again above their value. One would have fancied it

obvious that a man whose whole occupation was based on what in his

own language is called swindling, if it is done under other

conditions, ought to be ashamed of his position, and could not any

way, while he continues a merchant, profess himself a Christian or

a liberal.

 

But the sophistry of hypocrisy reasons that the merchant can pass

for a virtuous man without giving up his pernicious course of

action; a religious man need only have faith and a liberal man

need only promote the modification of external conditions—the

progress of industry. And so we see the merchant (who often goes

further and commits acts of direct dishonesty, selling adulterated

goods, using false weights and measures, and trading in products

injurious to health, such as alcohol and opium) boldly regarding

himself and being regarded by others, so long as he does not

directly deceive his colleagues in business, as a pattern of

probity and virtue. And if he spends a thousandth part of his

stolen wealth on some public institution, a hospital or museum or

school, then he is even regarded as the benefactor of the people

on the exploitation and corruption of whom his whole prosperity

has been founded: if he sacrifices, too, a portion of his ill-gotten gains on a Church and the poor, then he is an exemplary

Christian.

 

A manufacturer is a man whose whole income consists of value

squeezed out of the workmen, and whose whole occupation is based

on forced, unnatural labor, exhausting whole generations of men.

It would seem obvious that if this man professes any Christian or

liberal principles, he must first of all give up ruining human

lives for his own profit. But by the existing theory he is

promoting industry, and he ought not to abandon his pursuit. It

would even be injuring society for him to do so. And so we see

this man, the harsh slave-driver of thousands of men, building

almshouses with little gardens two yards square for the workmen

broken down in toiling for him, and a bank, and a poorhouse, and a

hospital—fully persuaded that he has amply expiated in this way

for all the human lives morally and physically ruined by him—and

calmly going on with his business, taking pride in it.

 

Any civil, religious, or military official in government employ,

who serves the state from vanity, or, as is most often the case,

simply for the sake of the pay wrung from the harassed and

toilworn working classes (all taxes, however raised, always fall

on labor), if he, as is very seldom the case, does not directly

rob the government in the usual way, considers himself, and is

considered by his fellows, as a most useful and virtuous member of

society.

 

A judge or a public prosecutor knows that through his sentence or

his prosecution hundreds or thousands of poor wretches are at once

torn from their families and thrown into prison, where they may go

out of their minds, kill themselves with pieces of broken glass,

or starve themselves; he knows that they have wives and mothers

and children, disgraced and made miserable by separation from

them, vainly begging for pardon for them or some alleviation of

their sentence, and this judge or this prosecutor is so hardened

in his hypocrisy that he and his fellows and his wife and his

household are all fully convinced that he may be a most exemplary

man. According to the metaphysics of hypocrisy it is held that he

is doing a work of public utility. And this man who has ruined

hundreds, thousands of men, who curse him and are driven to

desperation by his action, goes to mass, a smile of shining

benevolence on his smooth face, in perfect faith in good and in

God, listens to the Gospel, caresses his children, preaches moral

principles to them, and is moved by imaginary sufferings.

 

All these men and those who depend on them, their wives, tutors,

children, cooks, actors, jockeys, and so on, are living on the

blood which by one means or another, through one set of blood-suckers or another, is drawn out of the working class, and every

day their pleasures cost hundreds or thousands of days of labor.

They see the sufferings and privations of these laborers and their

children, their aged, their wives, and their sick, they know the

punishments inflicted on those who resist this organized plunder,

and far from decreasing, far from concealing their luxury, they

insolently display it before these oppressed laborers who hate

them, as though intentionally provoking them with the pomp of

their parks and palaces, their theaters, hunts, and races. At the

same time