“To be led by a coward is to be managed by all that the coward fears,” Octavia Butler wrote in her searing admonition about choosing our leaders. “To be led by a idiot is to be led by the opportunists who management the idiot.” However in some deep animal sense, to be led in any respect is to threat handing one’s personal ethical conscience over to a different. The paradox of our invasive species is that, as a result of there are just too many people, it’s our self-made destiny to be ruled — however we’re but to invent a type of authorities wholly free from evil.
Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828–November 20, 1910) tussles with this paradox all through Last Steps: The Late Writings of Leo Tolstoy (public library) — the gathering of his ultimate journals, which additionally gave us his reflections on science, spirituality, and our search for meaning.
Writing within the final days of the primary 12 months of the 20th century, the aged Tolstoy considers one of many chief hypocrisies of recent life:
The entire complexity of our city life lies in the truth that folks assume up and accustom themselves to dangerous necessities, after which use all their psychological energies to fulfill them or scale back the hurt attributable to satisfying them… Earlier than talking in regards to the goodness of satisfying one’s necessities, one should determine what necessities represent goodness. That’s crucial.
A lot of this confusion stems from the sheer complexity of managing human beings at scale. Contemplating the obsolescence of the state as a type of authorities — an entity that concentrates and magnifies humanity’s most harmful hypocrisies, making homicide on a big scale, within the type of warfare, morally permissible even for good individuals who condemn it on the small scale — he writes:
It’s amusing, the opinion folks have that non-resistance to evil by drive or paying again good for evil are excellent guidelines for people, however can’t be utilized to the state. As if the state isn’t a mixture of individuals, however one thing separate from folks. Oxygen has such and such properties. However they’re solely the properties of the atoms and molecules of oxygen. However oxygen in massive compounds acquires fairly totally different, reverse properties. This opinion alone that states have properties that are the other of human ones is the obvious proof of the out of date nature of the state as a type of authorities.
Seven years earlier, in reckoning with the fundaments of resistance to evil, Tolstoy had put it much more pointedly:
Violence now not rests on the idea in its utility, however solely on the very fact of its having existed so lengthy, and being organized by the ruling courses who revenue by it, in order that those that are beneath their authority can not extricate themselves from it. The governments of our day — all of them, essentially the most despotic and the liberal alike — have change into… organizations of violence primarily based on no precept however the grossest tyranny, and on the identical time benefiting from all of the means invented by science for the peaceable collective social exercise of free and equal males, utilized by them to enslave and oppress their fellows.
Complement with Hannah Arendt on our only effective antidote to evil, in society and within the self, and Bertrand Russell on how to heal an ailing and divided world, then revisit Tolstoy on kindness and the measure of love.
