The Kingdom of God is Within You / Christianity and Patriotism / MiscellaniesTolstoy, Leo, graf
Religion
The Kingdom of God is Within You / Christianity and Patriotism / Miscellanies
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Russian literature -- Translations into English
When the conquest is accomplished, the power of the conqueror
actually puts an end to internecine strife, and the social concept
of life receives its justification. But this confirmation is only
temporary. Internal strifes cease only in proportion as the pressure
of the power is exerted upon individuals who heretofore have been
warring against one another. The violence of internal struggle,
which is destroyed by the power, is conceived in the power itself.
The power is in the hands of just such people as all men are, that
is, of such as are always or frequently prepared to sacrifice the
common good for the sake of their personal good, with this one
difference, that these men do not have the tempering force of the
counter-action of the violated, and are subjected to the full
corrupting influence of power. Thus the evil of violence, passing
over into the hands of power, keeps growing more and more, and
in time comes to be greater than the one which it is supposed to
destroy, whereas in the members of society the proneness to violence
keeps weakening more and more, and the violence of power grows less
and less necessary.
The governmental power, even if it destroys inner violence,
invariably introduces new forms of violence into the lives of
men, and this grows greater and greater in proportion with its
continuance and intensification.
Thus, although the violence is less perceptible in the state than
the violence of the members of society against one another, since it
is not expressed by struggle, but by submission, the violence none
the less exists and for the most part in a much more powerful degree
than before.
This cannot be otherwise, because the possession of power not only
corrupts men, but the purpose or even unconscious tendency of the
violators will consist in bringing the violated to the greatest
degree of weakening, since, the weaker the violated man is, the less
effort will it take to suppress him.
For this reason the violence which is exerted against him who is
violated keeps growing to the farthest limit which it can attain
without killing the hen that is laying the golden eggs. But if
this hen does not lay, as in the case of the American Indians,
the Fijians, the Negroes, it is killed, in spite of the sincere
protestations of the philanthropists against such a mode of action.
The best confirmation of this is found in the condition of the
labouring classes of our time, who in reality are nothing but
subjugated people.
In spite of all the hypocritical endeavours of the higher classes
to alleviate the condition of the working people, all the working
people of our world are subject to an invariable iron law, according
to which they have only as much as they need to be always incited
by necessity to work and to have the strength for working for their
masters, that is, for the conquerors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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