1.The Bible, which is a very interesting and here and there very
profound book when considered as one of the oldest surviving
manifestations of human wisdom and fancy, expresses this truth very
naively in its myth of original sin. Jehovah, who of all the good gods
adored by men was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most
ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic,
and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty - Jehovah had just
created Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to
while away his time, which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal
egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new slaves. He generously
placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and
animals, and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He
expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of
himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the
eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the
eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He
makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates
him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging
him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.
We know what
followed. The good God, whose foresight, which is one of the divine
faculties, should have warned him of what would happen, flew into a
terrible and ridiculous rage; he cursed Satan, man, and the world
created by himself, striking himself so to speak in his own creation, as
children do when they get angry; and, not content with smiting our
ancestors themselves, he cursed them in all the generations to come,
innocent of the crime committed by their forefathers. Our Catholic and
Protestant theologians look upon that as very profound and very just,
precisely because it is monstrously iniquitous and absurd. Then,
remembering that he was not only a God of vengeance and wrath, but also a
God of love, after having tormented the existence of a few milliards of
poor human beings and condemned them to an eternal hell, he took pity
on the rest, and, to save them and reconcile his eternal and divine love
with his eternal and divine anger, always greedy for victims and blood,
he sent into the world, as an expiatory victim, his only son, that he
might be killed by men. That is called the mystery of the Redemption,
the basis of all the Christian religions. Still, if the divine Savior
had saved the human world! But no; in the paradise promised by Christ,
as we know, such being the formal announcement, the elect will number
very few. The rest, the immense majority of the generations present and
to come, will burn eternally in hell. In the meantime, to console us,
God, ever just, ever good, hands over the earth to the government of the
Napoleon Thirds, of the William Firsts, of the Ferdinands of Austria,
and of the Alexanders of all the Russias.
Such are the absurd
tales that are told and the monstrous doctrines that are taught, in the
full light of the nineteenth century, in all the public schools of
Europe, at the express command of the government. They call this
civilizing the people! Is it not plain that all these governments are
systematic poisoners, interested stupefies of the masses?
I have
wandered from my subject, because anger gets hold of me whenever I think
of the base and criminal means which they employ to keep the nations in
perpetual slavery, undoubtedly that they may be the better able to
fleece them. Of what consequence are the crimes of all the Tropmanns in
the world compared with this crime of treason against humanity committed
daily, in broad day, over the whole surface of the civilized world, by
those who dare to call themselves the guardians and the fathers of the
people? I return to the myth of original sin.
God admitted that
Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not deceive Adam and
Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the act of
disobedience which he bad induced them to commit; for, immediately they
had eaten of the forbidden fruit, God himself said (see Bible): "Behold,
man is become as of the Gods, knowing both good and evil; prevent him,
therefore, from eating of the fruit of eternal life, lest he become
immortal like Ourselves.
Let us disregard now the fabulous
portion of this myth and consider its true meaning, which is very clear.
Man has emancipated himself; he has separated himself from animality
and constituted himself a man; he has begun his distinctively human
history and development by an act of disobedience and science - that is,
by rebellion and by thought.
Three elements or, if you like,
three fundamental principles constitute the essential conditions of all
human development, collective or individual, in history:
(1) human animality;;
(2) thought; and
(3) rebellion.;
To the first properly corresponds social and private economy; to the second, science; to the third, liberty.
The people, unfortunately, are still very ignorant, and are kept in
ignorance by the systematic efforts of all the governments, who consider
this ignorance, not without good reason, as one of the essential
conditions of their own power. Weighted down by their daily labor,
deprived of leisure, of intellectual intercourse, of reading, in short
of all the means and a good portion of the stimulants that develop
thought in men, the people generally accept religious traditions without
criticism and in a lump. These traditions surround them from infancy in
all the situations of life, and artificially sustained in their minds
by a multitude of official poisoners of all sorts, priests and laymen,
are transformed therein into a sort of mental and moral babit, too often
more powerful even than their natural good sense.
2. "The idea
of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the
most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the
enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.
Unless,
then, we desire the enslavement and degradation of mankind, as the
Jesuits desire it, as the mÙmiers, pietists, or Protestant Methodists
desire it, we may not, must not make the slightest concession either to
the God of theology or to the God of metaphysics. He who, in this
mystical alphabet, begins with A will inevitably end with Z; he who
desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the
matter, but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity."
Real
humanity presents a mixture of all I that is most sublime and beautiful
with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world. How do they get
over this? Why, they call one divine and the other bestial,
representing divinity and animality as two poles, between which they
place humanity. They either will not or cannot understand that these
three terms are really but one, and that to separate them is to destroy
them.
AUTHORITY.
What is authority? Is it the inevitable power
of the natural laws which manifest themselves in the necessary
concatenation and succession of phenomena in the physical and social
worlds? Indeed, against these laws revolt is not only forbidden - it is
even impossible. We may misunderstand them or not know them at all, but
we cannot disobey them; because they constitute the basis and
fundamental conditions of our existence; they envelop us, penetrate us,
regulate all our movements, thoughts, and acts; even when we believe
that we disobey them, we only show their omnipotence.
Yes, we
are absolutely the slaves of these laws. But in such slavery there is no
humiliation, or, rather, it is not slavery at all. For slavery supposes
an external master, a legislator outside of him whom he commands, while
these laws are not outside of us; they are inherent in us; they
constitute our being, our whole being, physically - intellectually, and
morally: we live, we breathe, we act, we think, we wish only through
these laws. Without them we are nothing, we are not. Whence, then, could
we derive the power and the wish to rebel against them?
In his
relation to natural laws but one liberty is possible to man - that of
recognizing and applying them on an ever-extending scale in conformity
with the object of collective and individual emancipation or
humanization which he pursues. These laws, once recognized, exercise an
authority which is never disputed by the mass of men. One must, for
instance, be at bottom either a fool or a theologian or at least a
metaphysician, jurist, or bourgeois economist to rebel against the law
by which twice two make four. One must have faith to imagine that fire
will not burn nor water drown, except, indeed, recourse be had to some
subterfuge founded in its turn on some other natural law. But these
revolts, or, rather, these attempts at or foolish fancies of an
impossible revolt, are decidedly, the exception; for, in general, it may
be said that the mass of men, in their daily lives, acknowledge the
government of common sense - that is, of the sum of the natural laws
generally recognized - in an almost absolute fashion.
The great
misfortune is that a large number of natural laws, already established
as such by science, remain unknown to the masses, thanks to the
watchfulness of these tutelary governments that exist, as we know, only
for the good of the people. There is another difficulty - namely, that
the major portion of the natural laws connected with the development of
human society, which are quite as necessary, invariable, fatal, as the
laws that govern the physical world, have not been duly established and
recognized by science itself.
Once they shall have been
recognized by science, and then from science, by means of an extensive
system of popular education and instruction, shall have passed into the
consciousness of all, the question of liberty will be entirely solved.
The most stubborn authorities must admit that then there will be no need
either of political organization or direction or legislation, three
things which, whether they emanate from the will of the sovereign or
from the vote of a parliament elected by universal suffrage, and even
should they conform to the system of natural laws - which has never been
the case and never will be the case - are always equally fatal and
hostile to the liberty of the masses from the very fact that they impose
upon them a system of external and therefore despotic laws.
The
liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws
because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they
have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever,
divine or human, collective or individual
In general, we ask
nothing better than to see men endowed with great knowledge, great
experience, great minds, and, above all, great hearts, exercise over us a
natural and legitimate influence, freely accepted, and never imposed in
the name of any official authority whatsoever, celestial or
terrestrial. We accept all natural authorities and all influences of
fact, but none of right; for every authority or every influence of
right, officially imposed as such, becoming directly an oppression and a
falsehood, would inevitably impose upon us, as I believe I have
sufficiently shown, slavery and absurdity.
In a word, we reject
all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official,
and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage,
convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority
of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in
subjection to them.
This is the sense in which we are really Anarchists.
3.
...respect for man is the supreme law of Humanity, and that the great,
the real object of history, its only legitimate object is the
humanization and emancipation, the real liberty, the prosperity and
happiness of each individual living in society. For, if we would not
fall back into the liberticidal fiction of the public welfare
represented by the State, a fiction always founded on the systematic
sacrifice of the people, we must clearly recognize that collective
liberty and prosperity exist only so far as they represent the sum of
individual liberties and prosperities.
...religion is a
collective insanity, the more powerful because it is traditional folly,
and because its origin is lost in the most remote antiquity. As
collective insanity it has penetrated to the very depths of the public
and private existence of the peoples; it is incarnate in society; it has
become, so to speak, the collective soul and thought. Every man is
enveloped in it from his birth; he sucks it in with his mother's milk,
absorbs it with all that he touches, all that he sees. He is so
exclusive]y fed upon it, so poisoned and penetrated by it in all his
being that later, however powerful his natural mind, he has to make
unheard-of efforts to deliver himself from it, and then never completely
succeeds.
4. The State is force, and for it, first of all, is
the right of force... But man is so singularly constituted that this
argument, wholly eloquent as it may appear, is not sufficient in the
long run. Some moral sanction or other is absolutely necessary to
enforce his respect. Further, this sanction must be at once so simple
and so plain that it may convince the masses, who, after having been
reduced by the power of the State. must also be induced to morally
recognise its right...There is not, there cannot be, a State without
religion.
