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Tax Strike Tactics

One-in-a-Million Can Move the World

Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You is very influential among tax resisters in the Christian anarchist tradition. One of my favorite parts of the book is when Tolstoy explains why he thinks small, individual, conscientious actions are more crucial than they may first appear to be for creating large-scale social changes:

Men in their present condition are like a swarm of bees hanging in a cluster to a branch. The position of the bees on the branch is temporary, and must inevitably be changed. They must start off and find themselves a habitation. Each of the bees knows this, and desires to change her own and the others’ position, but no one of them can do it till the rest of them do it. They cannot all start off at once, because one hangs on to another and hinders her from separating from the swarm, and therefore they all continue to hang there. It would seem that the bees could never escape from their position, just as it seems that worldly men, caught in the toils of the state conception of life, can never escape. And there would be no escape for the bees, if each of them were not a living, separate creature, endowed with wings of its own. Similarly there would be no escape for men, if each were not a living being endowed with the faculty of entering into the Christian conception of life.

If every bee who could fly did not try to fly, the others, too, would never be stirred, and the swarm would never change its position. And if the man who has mastered the Christian conception of life would not, without waiting for other people, begin to live in accordance with this conception, mankind would never change its position. But only let one bee spread her wings, start off, and fly away, and after her another, and another, and the clinging, inert cluster would become a freely flying swarm of bees. Just in the same way, only let one man look at life as Christianity teaches him to look at it, and after him let another and another do the same, and the enchanted circle of existence in the state conception of life, from which there seemed no escape, will be broken through.

But men think that to set all men free by this means is too slow a process, that they must find some other means by which they could set all men free at once. It is just as though the bees who want to start and fly away should consider it too long a process to wait for all the swarm to start one by one; and should think they ought to find some means by which it would not be necessary for every separate bee to spread her wings and fly off, but by which the whole swarm could fly at once where it wanted to. But that is not possible; till a first, a second, a third, a hundredth bee spreads her wings and flies off of her own accord, the swarm will not fly off and will not begin its new life. Till every individual man makes the Christian conception of life his own, and begins to live in accord with it, there can be no solution of the problem of human life, and no establishment of a new form of life.

Sometimes, a single personal revolutionary really does change the world. Maybe the world was already ripe for changing, but it still needed a personal revolutionary to break from the pack and make the change happen.

What became known as the Coventry “tithe war” began modestly, with one solitary revolutionary taking flight and inviting the rest of the hive to join him. A contemporary newspaper account, in explaining where this sudden uprising came from, traced its roots to this one person who was willing to be thought eccentric even by his allies, while waiting for them to realize he was taking the lead:

A few individual citizens have maintained a consistent protest against a tax which they declared offended their consciences, and one tradesman, whose goods have been distrained year after year, has retaliated with equal regularity by issuing handbills setting forth his woes, and the rapacity of what he was wont to describe as “Mother Church.” The leading Nonconformists, and it may be said the Nonconformists as a body, have until lately refrained from all open sympathy with this suffering brother, whose controversial tactics were generally regarded as somewhat wanting in good taste. In the Autumn of last year the annual testimony borne in this quarter attracted more attention than usual in consequence of an open-air indignation meeting by which it was followed. The meeting was by no means influentially attended, and it was not believed at the time that it would have any important consequences. It led, however, to the formation of an Anti-Vicars’ Rate Association, whose action has brought about the present crisis.

Hennacy says self-transforming doers like Christ, the Buddha, Gandhi, or Joan of Arc were far more radical than theorizers like Marx or Bakunin. Thoreau would agree (though his own list—“Minerva, Ceres, Neptune, Prometheus, Socrates, Christ, Luther, Columbus, Arkwright”—was a little more ethereal). “I know of few radicals as yet who are radical enough,” he said, “and have not got this name rather by meddling with the exposed roots of innocent institutions than with their own.”

Humankind doesn’t progress by passively absorbing the inevitable bounty of history grinding away unconsciously on the masses, as the Hegelians might have it. Rather, says Thoreau, “The great benefactors of their race have been single and singular and not masses of men. Whether in poetry or history it is the same.” We should not be content to admire these heroes, or to await their arrival, but should be inspired by their examples to each be as heroic as we can.

The gods have given man no constant gift, but the power and liberty to act greatly. How many wait for health and warm weather to be heroic and noble! We are apt to think there is a kind of virtue which need not be heroic and brave—but in fact virtue is the deed of the bravest; and only the hardy souls venture upon it, for it deals in what we have no experience, and alone does the rude pioneer work of the world.

Action from principle,—the perception and the performance of right,—changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with any thing which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; aye, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

There is something proudly thrilling in the thought that this obedience to conscience and trust in God, which is so solemnly preached in extremities and arduous circumstances, is only to retreat to one’s self, and rely on our own strength. In trivial circumstances I find myself sufficient to myself, and in the most momentous I have no ally but myself, and must silently put by their harm by my own strength, as I did the former. As my own hand bent aside the willow in my path, so must my single arm put to flight the devil and his angels. God is not our ally when we shrink, and neuter when we are bold. If by trusting in God you lose any particle of your vigor, trust in Him no longer.… I cannot afford to relax discipline because God is on my side, for He is on the side of discipline.

We can’t all be Christ, Buddha, Gandhi, or Joan of Arc. (Steve Allen said that Ammon Hennacy was more of a Lenny Bruce-style character; Hennacy’s wife suggested that Don Quixote might be a better match.) It is only one-in-a-million who moves the world, but despite the odds we all should aspire to be this one in a million. Hennacy put it this way:

Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. Therefore one who has love, courage, and wisdom is one in a million who moves the world, as with Jesus, Buddha, and Gandhi.

If we choose this goal, even if we fall short, we not only have chosen a truly worthy goal, but we adjust our standards so that if we are ever lucky enough to meet this one in a million, we will be more likely to recognize her or him. Too many people are incapable of recognizing or comprehending the hero in real life—we lionize the dead martyred heroes of past generations, but join the lynch mobs to martyr the heroes of our own.

Notes and Citations