What has caused, and still causes, this surprising phenomenon that people suffering from the abuse of power, which they themselves tolerate and support, do not free themselves in the most simple and easy way from all the disasters brought about by power – that is to say, do not simply cease obeying it?  And not only do they not act thus, but they go on doing the very things that deprive them of physical and mental well-being.  They either continue to obey the existing power, or establish another similar force-using power and obey that.

Why is this so?  People feel that their unhappy position is the result of violence, and are dimly aware that they need freedom to get rid of their misery.  But, strange to say, to get rid of violence and gain freedom, they seek, invent, and use all sorts of measures: mutiny, change of rulers, alterations of government, all kinds of constitutions, new arrangements between different states, colonial policies, enrolment of the unemployed, trusts, and social organizations.  They employ everything but the one thing that would most simply, easily, and surely free them from all their distresses: the refusal to submit to power.

One might think that it must be quite clear to people, not deprived of reason, that violence breeds violence, and that the only means of deliverance from violence lies in not taking part in it.  This method, one would think, is quite obvious.  It is evident that a great majority of men can be enslaved by a small minority only if the enslaved themselves take part in their own enslavement.  If people are enslaved, it is only because they either fight violence with violence or participate in violence for their own personal profit.  Those who neither struggle against violence nor take part in it can no more be enslaved than water can be cut.  They can be robbed, prevented from moving about, wounded, or killed, but they cannot be enslaved – that is, made to act against their own reasonable will.

This is true both of individuals and of nations.  If the 200,000,000 Hindus did not submit to the power which demands their participation in deeds of violence, always connected with the taking of human life; if they did not enlist, paid no taxes to be used for violence, were not tempted by rewards offered by the conquerors (rewards originally taken from themselves), and did not submit to the English laws introduced among them; then neither 50,000 Englishmen, nor all the English in the world, could enslave India, even if instead of 200,000,000 there were but 1,000 Hindus.  So it is in the cases of Poles, Czechs, Irish, Bedouins, and all the conquered races.  And it is the same in the case of the workmen enslaved by the capitalists.  Not all the capitalists in the world could enslave the workers if the workmen themselves did not help, and did not take part in their own enslavement.

All this is so evident that one is ashamed to mention it.  And yet people, who discuss all other conditions of life reasonably, not only do not see and do not act as reason dictates in this matter, but act quite contrary to reason and to their own advantage.  Each one says, “I can’t be the first to do what nobody else does.  Let others begin, and then I too will cease to submit to power.”  And so says a second, a third, and everybody.  All, under the pretence that no one can begin, instead of acting in a manner unquestionably advantageous to all, continue to do what is disadvantageous to everybody, and is also irrational and contrary to human nature.  No one likes to cease submitting to power, lest he should be persecuted by power.  Yet he well knows that obeying power means being subject to all sorts of the gravest calamities in foreign or civil wars.

What is the cause of this?

The cause of it is that people do not reason when yielding to power, but act under the influence of something that has always been one of the most widespread motives of human action, and has lately been most carefully studied and explained.  It is called “suggestion” or hypnotism.  This hypnotism prevents people from acting in accordance with their reasonable nature and their own interest, and forces them to do what is unreasonable and disadvantageous.  It causes them to believe that the violence perpetrated by people calling themselves “the government” is not simply the immoral conduct of immoral men, but is the action of some mysterious, sacred being, called the state, without which men have never existed (which is quite untrue) and can never exist.

But how can reasonable beings, men, submit to such a surprising suggestion, contrary to reason, feeling, and to their own interest?

The answer to this question is that not only do children, the mentally diseased, and idiots succumb to hypnotic influence and suggestion, but all persons, to the extent to which their religious consciousness is weakened – their consciousness of their relation to the supreme cause on which their existence depends.  Most of the people of our times more and more lack this consciousness.

The reason that most people of our time lack this consciousness is that, having once committed the sin of submitting to human power, and not acknowledging this sin to be a sin, but trying to hide it from themselves or to justify it, they have exalted the power to which they submit to such an extent that it has replaced God’s law for them.  When human law replaced divine law, men lost religious consciousness and fell under governmental hypnotism, which suggests to them the illusion that those who enslave them are not simply lost, vicious men, but are representatives of that mystic being, the state, without which it is supposed that men are unable to exist.

The vicious circle has been completed.  Submission to power has weakened and partly destroyed the religious feeling in men, and the weakening and cessation of religious consciousness has subjected them to human power.

The sin of Power began with the oppressors saying to the oppressed, “Fulfill what we demand of you.  If you disobey, we will kill you.  But if you submit to us, we will introduce order and will protect you from other oppressors.”  And the oppressed, in order to live their accustomed lives, and not to have to fight these and other oppressors, seem to have answered, “Very well, we will submit to you.  Introduce whatever order you choose, and we will uphold it.  Only let us live quietly, supporting ourselves and our families.”

The oppressors did not recognize their sin, being carried away by the attractions and advantages of power.  The oppressed thought it no sin to submit to the oppressors, for it seemed better to submit than to fight.  But there was sin in this submission, and as great a sin as that of those who used violence.  Had the oppressed endured all the hardships, taxations, and cruelties without acknowledging the authority of the oppressors to be lawful, and without promising to obey it, they would not have sinned.  But in the promise to submit to power lay a sin (άμαρτία, error, sin) equal to that of the wielders of power.

In promising to submit to a force-using power, and in recognizing it as lawful, there lay a double sin.  First, in trying to free themselves from the sin of fighting, those who submitted condoned that sin in those to whom they submitted.  Secondly, they renounced their true freedom (i.e. submission to the will of God) by promising always to obey the power.  Such a promise to obey the power of man, including as it does the admission of the possibility of disobedience to God in case the demands of established power should clash with the laws of God, was a rejection of the will of God.  The force-using power of the state, demanding from those who submit to it participation in killing men – in wars, in executions, and in laws sanctioning preparations for wars and executions – is based on a direct contradiction to God’s will.  Therefore, those who submit to power thereby renounce their submission to the law of God.

One cannot yield a little on one point, and on another maintain the law of God.  It is evident that if God’s law can be replaced by human law in one thing, then God’s law is no longer the highest law incumbent on men at all times.  And if it is not that, it is nothing.

Deprived of the guidance given by divine law (that is, the highest capacity of human nature), men inevitably sink to that lowest grade of human existence where the only motives of their actions are their personal passions and the hypnotism to which they are subject.  All the nations that live in the unions called states lie under such a hypnotic suggestion of the necessity of obedience to government, and the Russian people are in the same condition.

This is the cause of that apparently strange phenomenon in which a hundred million Russian cultivators of the soil do not choose the most natural and best way out of their present condition: by simply ceasing to submit to any force-using power.  They need no kind of government, and constitute so large a majority that they may be called the whole Russian nation, but yet they continue to take part in the old government and enslave themselves more and more.  Or, fighting against the old government, they prepare for themselves a new one, which, like the old one, will employ violence.