The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy [books to read fiction .TXT] 📗

to their conscience without the least scruple or remorse.

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