Chapter 17 Volume 3 Faith-5

But it is not nature, but liberty itself, that has caused the greatest and most terrible confusion among us; and man's worst enemy is man.In the vast fields, hordes of lawless savages are still on the rampage; they kill each other, and they feast on each other's gods.Even if civilization at last united these bands of savages under the law into nations, these nations would still turn against each other, taking advantage of the powers which unions and laws gave them.Their armies cross forests and fields in peace, despite hardship and want; their armies meet each other, and seeing their own kind is like hearing the call to kill.Naval fleets are equipped with the highest achievements of human understanding, and they cross the ocean; men brave winds and waves, and rush to the barren plains to find the decisive battle of their kind; Destroy your own kind with your own hands.Even in countries where men seem to be equally united under the law, what reigns in the name of respectable laws is still largely violence and artifice; It is inappropriate to fight, so that it is impossible for the victim to formulate a plan for defending himself against injustice and violence.The majority of their fellow-creatures are in ignorance and guilt, and a small group rejoices in it, declaring it is their most desirable object to keep the majority in that state, to sink them still further, and thereby make the majority Be their slave forever; whoever dares to enlighten and improve the condition of the majority, they will make him suffer.It is still impossible anywhere to formulate a scheme for some improvement which would not seem to upset a multitude of self-interested purposes and cause war, which would not seem to To unite vastly different and contradictory ways of thinking into a unified struggle against oneself.Good is always weaker, because it is simple, and pleases only for itself; evil attracts everyone with the most seductive promises; They sign a truce, that they may oppose good with their combined forces for evil.Goodness, however, has little need of such confrontations, since good men too often fight and tear each other apart through misunderstanding, error, suspicion, and privacy—the more conscientiously each good man strives to carry out what he thinks is best, the greater is the relationship between them. The struggle becomes more intense; thus, they consume in their inner rivers a force that even united would find it difficult to counteract evil.One party blames the other party for being too aggressive, eager for success, and not good at waiting until the good result has been properly prepared; , and thought that the time for action had never come.Almost every one regards that which he happens to most clearly feel necessary and capable of accomplishing, as the most important and most urgent, and the inevitable starting point of all other improvements; , to obey him in order to achieve his purpose, they all think that their refusal to do so is a betrayal of a good cause; at the same time, others also make the same request to him from their own perspective, and they will also say that he is betrayed because he refuses to cooperate.Thus all good projects in the world appear to be reduced to vain endeavors which leave no trace of human existence.Meanwhile, everything goes on, for better or for worse, as it can go on without these efforts, but by the blind mechanism of nature.

Will everything go on like this forever?It will never go on like this again, unless the whole of man's existence is but a purposeless, meaningless game.Those savage races cannot remain in a state of savagery forever; no race can be born with all the gifts of perfection, and at the same time seem destined never to develop them, never to become more intelligent than some intelligent animal by nature. What can be transformed into something more clever.Those savages who were destined to be the ancestors of more powerful, cultured, and virtuous descendants could not imagine the purpose of their existence, or even comprehend the possibility of their existence in this rationally arranged world.Savage races can become civilized because they have become civilized, and even the most civilized peoples in the present world have their origins in barbarians.No matter whether civilization develops directly from human society naturally, or it often has to be produced through external education and demonstration, the original origin of all human civilization must be found in the education of superhumans. Anyway, the former barbarians have now reached Civilization, now barbarians, will gradually acquire civilization by the same path.Of course, they too will suffer from the dangers and corruptions of the first purely sensual civilization, which afflict civilized peoples to this day; Participate in the continuous progress of this whole.

It is the task of our species to unite ourselves into such a single whole, that all parts of this whole know each other thoroughly, and that everywhere receive the same cultural upbringing.Nature has been running towards this end from the first, and so have the passions and vices of men; conditions will then be met.Let us not ask history whether people on the whole have become more moral at all.Men do grow up to a liberty of wider scope, richer content, and greater power, but it is almost inevitable from their position that they use this liberty only for evil.Similarly, everyone should not ask history whether the aesthetic education and intellectual culture concentrated in a few places in the ancient world will surpass the modern world to a greater extent.It may happen that one gets a shameful answer, and in this respect it seems that humanity in its mature period is not advancing forward, but backward.However, everyone may ask history, when did the existing cultural education spread the most widely and be enjoyed by the greatest number of individuals.You will undoubtedly find that from the beginning of history to our present, a small number of bright cultural points have spread from their centers, influencing one person after another, and one nation after another; Go ahead for now. —This is the first goal to which man must reach in his infinite progress.Until this goal is achieved, and until the existing civilizations of each age are distributed over the entire inhabited earth, and we humans can communicate with each other without restriction, one nation must wait for others, one nation, in the common advance. Regions must wait for other regions, and each region or nation must bring its centuries-old apparent standstill or setback to this universal union for which they exist alone. as a sacrifice.After attaining that primary end in the future, when everything useful found at one end of the globe is at once known and communicated to all other parts, men will, without pause or retrogression, continue to use common forces and The unifying step raises itself to a level of civilization that we still lack to understand.

In those strange associations of irrational accidents united, which we call States, after they have only existed peacefully for a while, when the resistance to new oppressions has slackened, and the simmering of different forces has subsided. , the abuse of liberty assumes a fixed form by its own continuation and public tolerance, and the ruling classes, who undisputedly enjoy their vested privileges, not only extend them, but even give them There is nothing left to do but extend the same fixed form.Driven by their sense of dissatisfaction, these ruling classes will extend this privilege from generation to generation, never saying "that's enough," until at last the oppression reaches its highest point and becomes utterly intolerable, The oppressed will in turn gain from despair a strength which their centuries of worn-out courage could not give them.The oppressed, then, can no longer bear with any fellow man who is not willing to treat others as equals.In order to prevent violence and new oppression within each other, all oppressed will have the same obligations towards each other.In the agreement they concluded, each decided that what he decided was concerned with himself, and not with a subordinate whose misfortunes could never be painful to himself, whose fate could never be reversed. to himself; according to this agreement, no one would wish to be the one to do the permitted injustice, but each must, on the contrary, be afraid of being subjected to the injustice--this alone should be called An agreement to legislate, quite different from the decrees of a confederacy of nobles to its innumerable bands of slaves; such an agreement would certainly be just, would establish a true state in which every man, out of concern for his own but necessarily obliged to preserve the safety of all others without exception, since in a proper system of law any injury which he wishes to inflict on another does not fall upon the other, but is unquestionably In turn, it fell on his own head.

With the establishment of this one true state, with this solid foundation of domestic peace laid, wars abroad, at least with other true states, were impossible.Even for its own benefit, even if in order not to arouse in its own citizens the thoughts of injustice, robbery, and violence, so that they can never gain anything except what is legally obtained by their toil. It is also necessary to strictly prohibit, guard against, order compensation, and severely punish the damage done to neighboring countries by its own citizens, just as the damage is inflicted on its own citizens.This law for the protection of its neighbors is the law necessary for every country that is not a robber state.By the application of this law, all possibility of any just prosecution by one nation against another, and any emergency of defense between nations, is completely removed.There does not necessarily always exist between nations a direct relation which may give rise to strife; there usually exists only the relation of individual citizens of one nation to individual citizens of another; a citizen of the country; but the damage would be immediately compensated, to the satisfaction of the insulted nation. —Among such nations there is no rank that can be insulted, nor vanity that can be injured; no official has the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations, nor can he be induced to things, because such things could not possibly do him the slightest favor.It is impossible for a nation to unanimously resolve to fight against its neighbors for the sake of plunder, for in a state where all men are equal, the plunder will not be the spoils of a few, but must be among all Evenly distributed, but this share of personal income will never compensate him for the hard work he has paid for the war.Predatory wars are only possible and understandable when the benefits accrue to a few oppressors, while the harm, toil, and expense fall on countless hordes of slaves. —These real nations fear war against themselves, not by others like them, but only by those savages who have no skill in labor to enrich themselves, and are therefore bound to plunder, or who may be driven by their masters , a people of slaves engaged in a plunder of which they gain nothing.

Every true nation is undoubtedly stronger by its civilized arts than a savage; and the common interest of all calls for the union and strengthening of itself than a slave nation.No free nation can sensibly bear beside itself a system whose chiefs reap the advantage of their enslavement of neighboring peoples, and which, by its mere existence, is therefore a constant menace to the peace of its neighbours; The concern of free nations for their own security compels them to convert likewise all their neighbors around them into free nations, and so they are compelled, for their own happiness, to extend the kingdom of civilization to the savages, His kingdom extended to the slave peoples around him.These peoples, civilized or emancipated by free countries, soon came to have with their neighbours, who were still barbarous or in slavery, a relation which free countries had not so long ago had with themselves, and were obliged to do to them what the free countries had just done. have done to themselves; and therefore, after but a few truly free nations have appeared, the kingdom of civilization and liberty, and the consequent general peace, must gradually encompass the globe.

Thus, the establishment of a domestic legal system and the consolidation of peace among individuals must produce a just attitude of nations in their foreign relations with one another, and a general peace among nations.But the establishment of that domestic legal system and the emancipation of the first peoples that would become truly free necessarily arose out of the ever-increasing oppression of the ruled by the ruling class, which lasted so long that it became impossible. Endurable; it is a progress which we may calmly attribute to the lust and stupor of the ruling classes, although they are wary of such consequences.

In this one true state, all temptation to evil, even the possibility of rational will to evil, is removed, and man directs his will, so far as he can, toward good. No one likes evil because it is not good; what he likes in evil is only advantage and enjoyment, and evil promises him such things, and often does provide him with them in the present state of mankind.As long as this state of affairs persists, as long as vice is profitable, there is little hope for fundamental improvement of humanity as a whole.But in a civic order which will exist in the future, which reason requires, which the thinker can easily describe—though he has not found anywhere yet—and which will necessarily form the first peoples who really emancipate themselves, in such a In the system, evil never expresses good, but real evil, and pure self-love will check self-love from excessive, so that it will not flow into injustice.According to such a sure system in such a state, any deceit and oppression of others, any act of deceitful self-interest, is not only certain to be ineffective and wasteful, but even turned against the author; he himself.Neither within his own country nor abroad, nor in all the world, did he meet a man whom he could harm with impunity.You need not worry, though a man will decide to do evil simply for the sake of deciding to do it, though he can never be evil, and he will gain nothing from it except the harm he inflicts on himself.The use of liberty for evil has been eliminated; man must resolve, either to eliminate his liberty altogether, to become patiently a passive cog in the great machine of the whole world, or to turn his liberty into a passive cog. Liberty applies to good.Goodness, therefore, readily grows and develops on such prepared soil.After selfish ends of every kind can no longer separate men, nor consume their energies in their mutual struggle, it remains to them only to direct their combined forces toward the still left to them. their only common enemy, rebellious, undeveloped nature; and being no longer separated by private purposes, they must necessarily unite themselves for a single common purpose, thus producing a Crowds are everywhere animated by the same spirit and the same love.Since each individual evil can no longer be the good of anyone else, it is also the evil of the whole, the evil of each member of the whole, each of whom feels the same pain, and uses the same activity to deal with it. Compensation; any progress made by one individual is progress made by humanity as a whole.In this place where the small, narrow self of the individual has been destroyed by the rule of law, everyone loves anyone else as he loves himself; This greater self is nothing more than a simple component that can only share gains and losses with the whole.Here the struggle of evil against good is eliminated, since evil can no longer arise.The quarrels among good people disappear because of goodness.Now it is very easy for them to really like the good for its own sake, and not for the sake of its founders; and now the only thing they can concern themselves with is that they should discover the truth, and perform useful activities, and not who should do something like this.Here each is always ready to combine his strength with that of another, and to subordinate his strength to that of another; and whoever, according to the judgment of all, best accomplishes the best will He is embraced by all, and all share in his achievement with equal joy.

This is the purpose of our earthly life, which reason proposes to us and assures that it will be attained.This is by no means the kind of goal which we seem to have to pursue with all our might, but which we must think impossible to achieve, in order to use our powers in some great thing; ; such a thing is as certain as the existence of a sensible world and a rational race in time, for which nothing serious and rational at all is conceivable except by that end. Yes, and the existence of the species is intelligible only through this end.If the whole of human life were not reduced to a spectacle for demons, who inculcate in poor men this ineradicable disposition to eternal things, purely for the amusement of their constant pursuit of that which they continually avoid, Amuse yourself with what they keep recapturing and slipping from them, and amuse them in their endless lingering in the cycle of perpetual repetition, and laugh at how serious they take such vain antics ; if the wise man sees through this drama at once, and does not like to continue to play his part in it, but does not renounce life, thinking that the day when he wakes up to reason is the day when he dies on earth, then this purpose is It will definitely be achieved.Oh, this purpose is attainable in and through living, because reason commands us to live; this purpose is attainable, because I exist.