What to Do? Thoughts Evoked by the Census of MoscowTolstoy, Leo, graf
Philosophy
What to Do? Thoughts Evoked by the Census of Moscow
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Moscow (Russia) -- Social conditions; Social problems
What, then, will be the outcome of a few eccentric individuals, or
madmen, tilling the soil, making shoes, and so on, instead of smoking
cigarettes, playing whist, and roaming about everywhere to relieve their
tedium, during the space of the ten leisure hours a day which every
intellectual worker enjoys? This will be the outcome: that these madmen
will show in action, that that imaginary property for which men suffer,
and for which they torment themselves and others, is not necessary for
happiness; that it is oppressive, and that it is mere superstition; that
property, true property, consists only in one's own head and hands; and
that, in order to actually exploit this real property with profit and
pleasure, it is necessary to reject the false conception of property
outside one's own body, upon which we expend the best efforts of our
lives. The outcome us, that these men will show, that only when a man
ceases to believe in imaginary property, only when he brings into play
his real property, his capacities, his body, so that they will yield him
fruit a hundred-fold, and happiness of which we have no idea,--only then
will he be so strong, useful, and good a man, that, wherever you may
fling him, he will always land on his feet; that he will everywhere and
always be a brother to everybody; that he will be intelligible to
everybody, and necessary, and good. And men looking on one, on ten such
madmen, will understand what they must all do in order to loose that
terrible knot in which the superstition regarding property has entangled
them, in order to free themselves from the unfortunate position in which
they are all now groaning with one voice, not knowing whence to find an
issue from it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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