The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Answers

• Q21HABIT

  Can repeated obedience train a person to obey without judgment?

  Yes. Military drill, by deception, blows and vodka, turns sensible young men into soldiers who would bayonet their own fathers on command.

  On a fixed day they collect them, drive them together like a flock of sheep, and begin to train them in the military exercises and drill. Their teachers are fellows like themselves, only deceived and brutalized two or three years sooner. The means of instruction are: deception, stupefaction, blows, and vodka. And before a year has passed these good, intelligent, healthy-minded lads will be as brutal beings as their instructors. "Come, now, suppose your father were arrested and tried to make his escape?" I asked a young soldier. "I should run him through with my bayonet," he answered with the foolish intonation peculiar to soldiers; "and if he made off, I ought to shoot him," he added, obviously proud of knowing what he must do if his father were escaping. And when a good-hearted lad has been brought to a state lower than that of a brute, he is just what is wanted by those who use him as an instrument of violence. He is ready; the man has been destroyed and a new instrument of violence has been created.

  Chapter XII · Downloaded Gutenberg #43302 (Garnett translation); confirmed passage in Chapter XII.

• Q36STATE

  Should public officials carry out rules without exercising personal moral judgment?

  No. The state spreads each act of violence across many officials, each of whom says he only obeyed orders, so that no one feels responsible; every official must refuse.

  So many instigate, assist, or sanction the commission of every one of these actions that no one who has a hand in them feels himself morally responsible for it. It is the custom among assassins to oblige all the witnesses of a murder to strike the murdered victim, that the responsibility may be divided among as large a number of people as possible. The same principle in different forms is applied under the government organization in the perpetration of the crimes, without which no government organization could exist. Rulers always try to implicate as many citizens as possible in all the crimes committed in their support. Of late this tendency has been expressed in a very obvious manner by the obligation of all citizens to take part in legal processes as jurors, in the army as soldiers, in the local government, or legislative assembly, as electors or members. Just as in a wicker basket all the ends are so hidden away that it is hard to find them, in the state organization the responsibility for the crimes committed is so hidden away that men will commit the most atrocious acts without seeing their responsibility for them.

  Chapter XII · Opened Marxists Internet Archive chapter 12 (responsibility diffused from soldier to Tsar); Project Gutenberg Garnett translation page; first published Germany 1894.