A man who continues to live in error sees the incarnation of power in certain sacred institutions, which are the indispensable organs of the social body.  The man who awakens to the truth sees this assumed by men sunk in error and who attribute to it a fantastic importance having no possible justification, and who accomplish their will by force.

For those with insight, these lost people, bribed as often as not, resemble brigands who hold up travelers on the high roads.  For anyone who has awakened to the truth, the entity called the State does not exist, and therefore there is not the slightest justification, for him, for the acts of violence committed in the name of the State.  And any participation in these acts is impossible for him.

To sum up, State violence will disappear, not with the aid of external means, but thanks only to the calls of conscience of men who have awakened to the truth.  (Daily Reading, October 16th)

The objection will be made, “But how can we get along without a government or any public authority?  No state of society has ever existed without a government or any public authority?”

Men are so accustomed to the government under which they live that it seems to them an inevitable, permanent form of social life.  To tell the truth, it is so only in appearance.  Men have lived and are still living outside of any static organization.  All the savage peoples who have not yet attained to what we call civilization have lived and are still living in that way.  Men whose conceptions of life go beyond civilization live thus also.  They are living in Europe, in America, and above all in Russia, where Christian communities deny public authority, not feeling the need of it and submitting only to forced interference.

The State is only a temporary form of human groups.  Just as the life of an individual is constantly in a state of evolution and bettering itself, so the life of an entire community progresses and improves.

Every human being begins as a nurseling, playing and studying.  Then he begins to work, marries, brings up his children, rids himself little by little of his passions, and acquires wisdom with age.  The life of nations evolves in the same way, only their phases of development last not years, but hundreds and thousands of years.  And as the necessary transformations take place in the individual in the spiritual, intangible world, the essential changes in humanity take place at first in the intangible world also: that of the religious conscience.  In the individual, the transformations are so slow that one could not indicate the month, the day or the hour when the child becomes a youth, and the youth an adult.  We cannot always say positively when these changes have already taken place.  Neither can we indicate the epoch when humanity, or a certain part of humanity, passed from one religious age into another.  But as we perceive that a youth is no longer a child, we see that humanity, or a certain part of it, has passed from one period into another after the change has already taken place.

Today we are watching the passage of humanity from one age to another among the nations of the Christian world.

We do not know the hour when a child becomes a youth, but we know that he can no longer play childish games.  We cannot indicate the year, nor even the decade, when the Christian world passed from its former form of life and commenced the other age, determined by the religious conscience, but we cannot help seeing that the Christian world can no longer play seriously at conquests, diplomatic artifices, constitutions, or democratic, socialist, revolutionary, and anarchist parties.  And above all, we cannot help seeing that the Christian world can no longer give itself up to all sorts of games that are based on violence.

This phenomenon is becoming evident among us particularly in Russia, after the external transformation of our political government.  Serious-minded people cannot help feeling, as regards this new form of government, as an adult would feel if he were given a present of a toy that he had never seen as a child.  No matter how interesting and new the toy is, the adult has no need of it, and can only receive it with a smile.  That is the attitude in Russia of all thinking men, as well as of the popular masses, in regard to the constitution, the duma, and all sorts of parties, revolutionary and otherwise.

I am convinced that Russians realize the true sense of Christ’s doctrine.  They can no longer seriously believe that a man’s mission here below is to employ the short period between birth and death in making speeches to legislative assemblies, in judging his brothers in the courts, in capturing them, in locking them up and murdering them, in throwing bombs at them, and in taking away their property.  They can no longer bother as to whether Finland, India, Poland, or Korea is annexed to what is called Russia, England, Prussia, or Japan.  They no longer seek to liberate these countries by force or prepare to kill each other in quantities for that purpose.  It is impossible for a man of our time to be ignorant in his inner consciousness of the madness of such acts.

If we do not perceive the horror of the existence that we lead, which is contrary to our nature, it is only because the atrocities, in the midst of which we continue to live peacefully, appear so slowly that we do not perceive them.

I once saw an old man abandoned to a horrible fate.  Worms were crawling all over his body, and he could not move an inch without suffering atrociously.  Nevertheless, the progress of the disease was so slow that he did not perceive the horror of his condition.  He only asked for tea and sugar.

The same phenomenon is taking place in our social life.  We no longer see its horror because we have come to our present condition by degrees, and, even as the old man, we rejoice at the appearance of cinemas and automobiles.

It is not enough to say that the suppression of violence – violence so contrary to the reasoning and loving nature of man – cannot make our present condition worse.  That is why the question as to whether we can live without governments not only is not necessary, as the defenders of the existing order of things would have us believe, but it is quite ridiculous.  It would be similar to asking a man suffering torture how he could live if his martyrdom stopped.

The privileged members of the present State imagine that the absence of every static organization would cause complete anarchy, the struggle of all against all, as if it concerned a life in common, not only of animals (they live in peace without static violence), but of certain monstrous creatures, guided in their acts only by hate and madness.  To tell the truth, they picture men like this because they attribute to them aptitudes contrary to their natures, and which, in reality, are developed by the state of government that they uphold, in spite of the evil that it does to men.

That is why the question of what would men’s lives would be like without government or public authority can only be answered by saying it is certain that, in any case, the evils caused by the government will disappear.  There will be no more exclusive possession of the earth, no more taxes employed for harmful purposes, no more divisions between nations, no more subjection of some by the rest, no more dissipation of all human forces to make war, no more fear of bombs on one side or of gallows on the other, and no more mad luxury for part of the people and horrible poverty for the rest.