Define Success and Failure Carefully

Be careful how you define “success.” You can do everything you set out to do, but if you haven’t set out to do anything worth doing, you still fail. Even in mundane things, you’d be wise to keep your eye on a bigger picture.

Success and failure have superficial and deep components that may contradict each other. John Brown set out to launch a rebellion that would end American slavery; the government stood its ground and defended slavery against the rebellion and had Brown hanged. Who was successful? Who won? A victory for evil is just a triumphant form of failure. And a year and a half after Brown’s execution when Union troops set off to finish the work Brown had started, they were singing “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave—his soul is marching on!”

In the wake of the Harpers Ferry raid with which John Brown hoped to launch a slave rebellion across the United States, Brown was called insane by the pulpit, popular opinion, and the press (even—especially—the liberal, abolitionist press). Some even said he was insane because of the most extraordinarily sane thing about him:

It is mentioned against him, and as an evidence of his insanity, that he was “a conscientious man, very modest in his demeanor, apparently inoffensive until the subject of slavery was introduced, when he would exhibit a feeling of indignation unparalleled.”

You would think, with the example of Jesus hovering over Western Civilization, that people would be skeptical of traditional notions of success. (Being captured and tortured to death by your enemies and having your followers scorned and scattered throughout a hostile empire doesn’t seem much like a victory.) But Thoreau thought the response to John Brown proved that even after centuries of Christianity, “[i]f Christ should appear on earth he would on all hands be denounced as a mistaken, misguided man, insane & crazed.”

You don’t have to believe that history will eventually smile on you and turn your seeming defeats and setbacks into obvious victories. You don’t have to believe the nice-sounding but unlikely sentiment that Hennacy liked to quote (he attributed it to Tolstoy): “no sincere effort made in the behalf of Truth is ever lost.” You just need to remember that seemingly small victories in an uncompromising personal revolution can be more worthwhile (when seen from the perspective of what is worthwhile, not just what is expedient) than huge triumphs that are born decaying from compromise and half-truths.

Slavery in particular was such an unambiguous evil that to Thoreau it was one of “those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply.” He made this comparison: if the only way you can save yourself from drowning is to unjustly wrest a plank away from another drowning person, you must instead do what is just even if it kills you. If you are “victorious” in wresting away the plank, and thereby save your own life at the cost of another, you lose.

But even in cases not as extreme as slavery, he says, compromise and expediency are overrated: “there is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of ‘expediency.’ There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals the only sliders are backsliders.”

The personal revolution is more about doing the right thing daily than achieving the right result eventually, so even if it seems that everything is going against you, you can be confident you’re on the right track. “[B]e as unconcerned for victory as careless of defeat,” Thoreau advises, “not seeking to lengthen our term of service, nor to cut it short by a reprieve, but earnestly applying ourselves to the campaign before us.” Or, as Hennacy put it:

If you want to change things you have to get 51% of the ballots or the bullets. If I want to change things I just have to keep on doing what I am doing—that is: every day the government says “pay taxes for war”; every day I do not pay taxes for war. So I win and they lose. The One Man Revolution—you can’t beat it.

Do not let your opponent set the norm. Generally a minority is jeered at because they are so small. It is quality and not quantity that is the measure. “One on the side of God is a majority” is the perfect answer which I have given dozens of times with success.

In the worst of times, when someone with moral courage and integrity stands alone and has little hope of accomplishing much by trying to hold back the tide, their seemingly futile assertions of integrity may still be important because of the hope they inspire in others—perhaps unknown people, far away and in the distant future. Hannah Arendt wrote of her studies of collaborators and resisters during the Holocaust:

[N]othing can ever be “practically useless,” at least, not in the long run.… For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everyone’s grasp… [U]nder conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

Notes and Citations

Thoreau quotes from the 21 October 1859 Boston Journal in a journal entry begun on 19 October 1859, from The Price of Freedom (2008) pp. 204–10
Thoreau, H.D., 19 October 1859 journal entry, from The Price of Freedom (2008) pp. 204–10
Hennacy, Ammon “Radical Philosophy” The Book of Ammon (1970) p. 108
The closest thing I have found to the “no sincere effort” quote in Tolstoy’s works comes from his 1902 essay “To the Working People” in which he says “…one thing is unquestionable, and that is, that not one sincere effort of a man to act in this matter [the ownership of land] in godly fashion or in accordance with his conscience will be lost.” Tolstoy follows this with a paragraph that harmonizes well with this chapter:

“What can I alone do against all?” people frequently say, when they are confronted with an act which is not countenanced by the majority. To these people it seems that for the success of a thing there must be all, or at least many; but there must be many only for a bad thing. For a good thing it is enough if there be one, because God is always with him who does a good thing. And with whom God is, sooner or later all men will be.
Thoreau, H.D. “Resistance to Civil Government”
Thoreau, H.D. “Slavery in Massachusetts”
Thoreau, H.D., July/August 1840 journal entry, from The Price of Freedom (2008) pp. 16–17
Hennacy, Ammon “The Anarchist and the Banker” The Book of Ammon (1970) p. 216
Hennacy, Ammon “Putting the Worst Foot Forward” The Book of Ammon (1970) p. 227. Hennacy paraphrases Thoreau, who wrote that “those who call themselves abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.” (Thoreau “Resistance…” op. cit.)
Arendt, Hannah Eichmann in Jerusalem (2006 ed.) p. 233