The Revolution Is Within You

I sent you once a song with the refrain:

 Let me be the one
 To do what is done

…You see the beauty of my proposal is
It needn’t wait on general revolution.
I bid you to a one-man revolution
The only revolution that is coming.

In Robert Frost’s poem “Build Soil,” from which the above excerpt is taken, he complains of friends who “crowd around me with their five year plans,” and he gives this advice:

Don’t join too many gangs. Join few if any.

Perhaps, contrary to what the organizers of the world are always telling us, the key to curing society’s ills is not necessarily to organize at all. You don’t need to build a majority, or a critical mass, or a disciplined revolutionary vanguard. Just get your own house in order and commit yourself to your own personal revolution—that’s the most crucial, practical, and effective thing you can be doing right now.

So while in the previous chapters I concentrated on tactics that help tax resistance movements succeed, I also want to consider how tax resisters can succeed even without being part of a movement.

“The one-man revolution” that Frost champions is the answer to the question posed so frequently by erstwhile radicals and reformers: “What can just one person do?” I suspect that some ask because they hope that the answer will be “nothing, so don’t sweat it.” They think the revolution that will finally put things right is scheduled for later—when the masses see the light… when a crisis comes… when we find a charismatic leader… when we unite the factions under one banner… when… when… when…

The solo revolutionary says: no, the revolution starts here and now. There are five reasons why the personal revolution might be the most effective one:

1. With the personal revolution, success is in reach. It may not be easy, but you can win this revolution with your own effort. Furthermore, whether or not you succeed, the struggle itself is the right thing to do.
2. You don’t need to wait for a majority. You don’t have to water down your message to win mass appeal or group consensus. You can start immediately from a firm platform of integrity and honesty. This also makes you more self-reliant so that you can endure challenges better, which helps you to be more effective than those revolutionaries who always have to check to see if the rest of the pack is still with them.
3. Political revolutions without personal revolutions are a poor way to make enduring radical change—they tend to just change the faces of the clowns running the circus while leaving intact the relationship between the government and its subjects that is really the root of the problem.
4. The world sometimes is changed radically and for the better by the efforts and example of a single, one-in-a-million character. But the first step is not to set out to change the world, but to develop such a character.
5. Although you engage in a solo revolution, this doesn’t mean you are alone: you will “leaven the loaf” and cause all society to rise, you will attract other personal revolutionaries to your side, and you will sow the seeds that inspire others.

This chapter asks you to consider the personal revolution and in particular the arguments in its favor from two of its strongest advocates: Ammon Hennacy and Henry David Thoreau, both of whom included tax resistance in their revolutions.