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The Kingdom of God is within you

L >> Leo Tolstoy >> The Kingdom of God is within you




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 bound to carry out
the suggestion--he thinks he cannot stop--but the nearer he gets
to the time and the place of the action, the more the benumbed
conscience begins to stir, to resist, and to try to awake. And no
one can say beforehand whether he will carry out the suggestion or
not; which will gain the upper hand, the rational conscience or
the irrational suggestion. It all depends on their relative
strength.

That is just the case with the men in the Toula train and in
general with everyone carrying out acts of state violence in our
day.

There was a time when men who set out with the object of murder
and violence, to make an example, did not return till they had
carried out their object, and then, untroubled by doubts or
scruples, having calmly flogged men to death, they returned home
and caressed their children, laughed, amused themselves, and
enjoyed the peaceful pleasures of family life. In those days it
never struck the landowners and wealthy men who profited by these
crimes, that the privileges they enjoyed had any direct connection
with these atrocities. But now it is no longer so. Men know now,
or are not far from knowing, what they are doing and for what
object they do it. They can shut their eyes and force their
conscience to be still, but so long as their eyes are opened and
their conscience undulled, they must all--those who carry out and
those who profit by these crimes alike--see the import of them.
Sometimes they realize it only after the crime has been
perpetrated, sometimes they realize it just before its
perpetration. Thus those who commanded the recent acts of
violence in Nijni-Novgorod, Saratov, Orel, and the Yuzovsky
factory realized their significance only after their perpetration,
and now those who commanded and those who carried out these crimes
are ashamed before public opinion and their conscience. I have
talked to soldiers who had taken part in these crimes, and they
always studiously turned the conversation off the subject, and
when they spoke of it it was with horror and bewilderment. There
are cases, too, when men come to themselves just before the
perpetration of the crime. Thus I know the case of a sergeant-
major who had been beaten by two peasants during the repression of
disorder and had made a complaint. The next day, after seeing the
atrocities perpetrated on the other peasants, he entreated the
commander of his company to tear up his complaint and let off the
two peasants. I know cases when soldiers, commanded to fire, have
refused to obey, and I know many cases of officers who have
refused to command expeditions for torture and murder. So that
men sometimes come to their senses long before perpetrating the
suggested crime, sometimes at the very moment before perpetrating
it, sometimes only afterward.

The men traveling in the Toula train were going with the object of
killing and injuring their fellow-creatures, but none could tell
whether they would carry out their object or not. However obscure
his responsibility for the affair is to each, and however strong
the idea instilled into all of them that they are not men, but
governors, officials, officers, and soldiers, and as such beings
can violate every human duty, the nearer they approach the place
of the execution, the stronger their doubts as to its being right,
and this doubt will reach its highest point when the very moment
for carrying it out has come.

The governor, in spite of all the stupefying effect of his
surroundings, cannot help hesitating when the moment comes to give
final decisive command. He knows that the action of the Governor
of Orel has called down upon him the disapproval of the best
people, and he himself, influenced by the public opinion of the
circles in which he moves, has more than once expressed his
disapprobation of him. He knows that the prosecutor, who ought to
have come, flatly refused to have anything to do with it, because
he regarded it as disgraceful. He knows, too, that there may be
changes any day in the government, and that what was a ground for
advancement yesterday may be the cause of disgrace to-morrow. And
he knows that there is a press, if not in Russia, at least abroad,
which may report the affair and cover him with ignominy forever.
He is already conscious of a change in public opinion which
condemns what was formerly a duty. Moreover, he cannot feel fully
assured that his soldiers will at the last moment obey him. He is
wavering, and none can say beforehand what he will do.

All the officers and functionaries who accompany him experience in
greater or less degree the same emotions. In the depths of their
hearts they all know that what they are doing is shameful, that to
take part in it is a discredit and blemish in the eyes of some
people whose opinion they value. They know that after murdering
and torturing the defenseless, each of them will be ashamed to
face his betrothed or the woman he is courting. And besides, they
too, like the governor, are doubtful whether the soldiers'
obedience to orders can be reckoned on. What a contrast with the
confident air they all put on as they sauntered about the station
and platform! Inwardly they were not only in a state of suffering
but even of suspense. Indeed they only assumed this bold and
composed manner to conceal the wavering within. And this feeling
increased as they drew near the scene of action.

And imperceptible as it was, and strange as it seems to say so,
all that mass of lads, the soldiers, who seemed so submissive,
were in precisely the same condition.

These are not the soldiers of former days, who gave up the natural
life of industry and devoted their whole existence to debauchery,
plunder, and murder, like the Roman legionaries or the warriors of
the Thirty Years' War, or even the soldiers of more recent times
who served for twenty-five years in the army. They have mostly
been only lately taken from their families, and are full of the
recollections of the good, rational, natural life they have left
behind them.

All these lads, peasants for the most part, know what is the
business they have come about; they know that the landowners
always oppress their brothers the peasants, and that therefore it
is most likely the same thing here. Moreover, a majority of them
can now read, and the books they read are not all such as exalt a
military life; there are some which point out its immorality.
Among them are often free-thinking comrades--who have enlisted
voluntarily--or young officers of liberal ideas, and already the
first germ of doubt has been sown in regard to the unconditional
legitimacy and glory of their occupation.

It is true that they have all passed through that terrible,
skillful education, elaborated through centuries, which kills all
initiative in a man, and that they are so trained to mechanical
obedience that at the word of command: "Fire!--All the line!--
Fire!" and so on, their guns will rise of themselves and the
habitual movements will be performed. But "Fire!" now does not
mean shooting into the sand for amusement, it means firing on
their broken-down, exploited fathers and brothers whom they see
there in the crowd, with women and children shouting and waving
their arms. Here they are--one with his scanty beard and patched
coat and plaited shoes of reed, just like the father left at home
in Kazan or Riazan province; one with gray beard and bent back,
leaning on a staff like the old grandfather; one, a young fellow
in boots and a red shirt, just as he was himself a year ago--he,
the soldier who must fire upon him. There, too, a woman in reed
shoes and PANYOVA, just like the mother left at home.

Is it possible they must fire on them? And no one knows what each
soldier will do at the last minute. The least word, the slightest
allusion would be enough to stop them.

At the last moment they will all find themselves in the position
of a hypnotized man to whom it has been suggested to chop a log,
who coming up to what has been indicated to him as a log, with the
ax already lifted to strike, sees that it is not a log but his
sleeping brother. He may perform the act that has been suggested
to him, and he may come to his senses at the moment of performing
it. In the same way all these men may come to themselves in time
or they may go on to the end.

If they do not come to themselves, the most fearful crime will be
committed, as in Orel, and then the hypnotic suggestion under
which they act will be strengthened in all other men. If they do
come to themselves, not only this terrible crime will not be
perpetrated, but many also who hear of the turn the affair has
taken will be emancipated from the hypnotic influence in which
they were held, or at least will be nearer being emancipated from
it.

Even if a few only come to themselves, and boldly explain to the
others all the wickedness of such a crime, the influence of these
few may rouse the others to shake off the controlling suggestion,
and the atrocity will not be perpetrated.

More than that, if a few men, even of those who are not taking
part in the affair but are only present at the preparations for
it, or have heard of such things being done in the past, do not
remain indifferent but boldly and plainly express their
detestation of such crimes to those who have to execute them, and
point out to them all the senselessness, cruelty, and wickedness
of such acts, that alone will be productive of good.

That was what took place in the instance before us. It was enough
for a few men, some personally concerned in the affair and others
simply outsiders, to express their disapproval of floggings that
had taken place elsewhere, and their contempt and loathing for
those who had taken part in inflicting them, for a few persons in
the Toula case to express their repugnance to having any share in
it; for a lady traveling by the train, and a few other bystanders
at the station, to express to those who formed the expedition
their disgust at what they were doing; for one of the commanders
of a company, who was asked for troops for the restoration of
order, to reply that soldiers ought not to be butchers--and thanks
to these and a few other seemingly insignificant influences
brought to bear on these hypnotized men, the affair took a
completely different turn, and the troops, when they reached the
place, did not inflict any punishment, but contented themselves
with cutting down the forest and giving it to the landowner.

Had not a few persons had a clear consciousness that what they
were doing was wrong, and consequently influenced one another in
that direction, what was done at Orel would have taken place at
Toula. Had this consciousness been still stronger, and had the
influence exerted been therefore greater than it was, it might
well have been that the governor with his troops would not even
have ventured to cut down the forest and give it to the landowner.

Had that consciousness been stronger still, it might well have
been that the governor would not have ventured to go to the scene
of action at all; even that the minister would not have ventured
to form this decision or the Tzar to ratify it.

All depends, therefore, on the strength of the consciousness 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.

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