Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → ethics → personal development as a means of political change

and I started to ramble on a bit about how I first came to be scared of Nazis and why they still have me looking over my shoulder today. is part three of Nazis Creep Me Out, subtitled: The Road to Auschwitz is Paved with Good Telemarketers

Maybe it’s a little phobic to worry so much about the possibility of your neighbors turning into cogs in a mass killing machine. Maybe not. One estimate was that (), governments had organized people in such a way as to murder about 170,000,000 noncombatants off of the field of war (typically their own citizens) in . An additional number of people, about a quarter as large a total, were killed in the course of warfare in .

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations show that that comes to about two and a half million each year, about 6,500 per day, about one every 13 seconds.

Even as a public health problem, that’s big: Compare it to, say, malaria, which kills over a million people each year, or tuberculosis and AIDS, which kill some two million each, for instance. But there’s something worse about a calamity that’s deliberately inflicted — worse and at the same time something that requires attention: it seems to be not only something that people might hope to prevent, but something that people might be convinced not to commit. That at least gives us another angle than we’ve got, say, on tuberculosis.

There’s a huge preexisting canon of poetic “why?”s about “man’s inhumanity to man” that I didn’t really intend to try to add any more redundancies to, so I’ll stop there.

Just about everybody has thought about this problem at some point or other, maybe even dwelled on it. And then most of us just kind of give up. The giving up is accompanied by a resigned commemoration that goes a little something like this:

The human race — so full of noble aspirations, so capable of warm emotions, uniquely gifted in our capacity for communication and altruism — and yet ironically so brutal, so unrepentantly savage, so war-loving. We’ve always been this way, and we always will be, in the absence of some science-fiction solution, until (chances are) we finally wipe ourselves out. The cost of this is so high, and has been for so long, that this desperation I feel to find a solution is surely not new, and if our good intentions and our cleverness and reason were enough to solve the problem, surely we would at least have a solution in sight by now… but we don’t. We can continue to chant “peace” until we’re blue in the face, but it isn’t going to change this fact. Wars, massacres — nobody wants them to happen, but they will, and it’s a fool’s errand to try to bring us a world without them.

This outlook may be as true as it is pessimistic. But it really misses the point that it pretends to be addressing so soberly, and becomes an unhealthy evasion. I see two related catches: First, it poses the problem of these two and a half million deaths per year as a problem demanding an all-or-nothing solution. Second, and because of this, it can only imagine a utopian, top-down solution.

The first catch comes from looking at the pile of mangled bodies from a century, or from a war, or from a policy and, being overwhelmed, wanting to come up with something that would prevent them all at once. For example: What if we had a world-wide government, democratic of course, that guaranteed political freedoms, and had a universally respected judiciary that peoples and countries could turn to to resolve grievances? Then we wouldn’t need wars and massacres to solve our problems! And pigs could perch on phone lines instead of taking up valuable real estate!

(Some darker utopian visions stem from a similar urge: What if instead of our tribe and their tribe always going to war over this and that, there were only our tribe and theirs had become extinct?)

If in looking for a solution you find none that promise to more-or-less completely solve the problem except for grandiose sci-fi utopian schemes you have no hope of implementing — the next step isn’t to give up, but to back up.

The point is that a proposal that lessens the problem, or a small first step that doesn’t do much in itself but is the first step in slowly, incrementally or gradually solving the problem, may be a good proposal. Even something that merely prevents things from getting worse is worth listening to when the stakes are so high! Humanity may not ever find an on/off switch for this horror, but perhaps it can learn to turn the volume down.

The second catch is in assuming that because the solution is necessarily so gigantic and universal in its nature that it must be something that is implemented top-down — from the headquarters of the United Nations, or via Pax Americana, or from a spacecraft sent by benevolent aliens, or from God.

I think there may be a solution that’s admittedly gradual and slow, but also promises to be practical and to show returns more than proportional to the extent that it is applied. Furthermore, it’s not top-down — it isn’t even bottom-up — it’s anybody-out. It necessarily, crucially, begins with and within individual people. (And no, it’s not tax resistance, but for me that’s part of how it’s blooming).

It comes down to this: I don’t think there are enough sufficiently angry people in the world, or enough cruel psychopaths in the world, to murder two and a half million people a year all by themselves. They need help and they need accomplices — people who aren’t themselves inclined to do these things but are willing to do them anyway by convincing themselves they’re doing something else, be it “following orders” or “doing my duty” or “earning a living somehow.”

As Hannah Arendt demonstrated in her examples, where enough of these people can be found, the wheels of what she calls “administrative massacre” are greased. But she also found that where enough counterexamples are found, they become monkeywrenches in this same machinery. And where they’re especially numerous, they can break the machinery entirely.

Every “administrative massacre” will be a little different — the victims will be chosen differently, and different methods will be used. What will the gas chambers look like next time — a mushroom cloud, a virus released on a subway, a gulag archipelago for terrorist suspects?

Who is stacking the bricks? Who is conducting the trains? You’ll know them by their excuses — “what can you do?” “I’ve got nothing against them personally” “it’s my job” “somebody else would do it if I didn’t” “I’ve got a family to feed” “I don’t make the rules” “they don’t pay me to think about that.”

And you can hear these excuses around you today, right where you live. People who are doing rude, anti-social, dishonest things but who insist that they aren’t rude, or anti-social, or dishonest people — it’s their job, or it’s the rules, or it’s just a part they’re playing.

I try very hard never to make these kind of excuses. Which is to say that I try not to put myself into the sorts of positions where excuses like these might seem reasonable to me. I think I may avoid killing a Jew some day this way.

And when telemarketers call I tell them, politely but firmly, that it is rude to call up a stranger just to try to sell them something, and won’t they please consider another line of work. “What can you do?” “it’s my job” “somebody else would do it if I didn’t” “I’ve got a family to feed” “I don’t make the rules” “they don’t pay me to think about that.” I’m as persistent as they are, and eventually they hang up. Still, I think I may save a Jew some day this way.

I make up aphorisms for myself, sometimes paraphrasing from others when my creativity isn’t up to it. Here’s one: “Have the courage to fight for what you believe in, the stubbornness not to fight without believing, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Usually, like this one, they aren’t very good, either not very catchy or too glib, but it keeps me thinking about it.

And steps like this are my solution, anyone-out. We’re anyone. Over and out.

In discussion with a reader (liberally edited for clarity), I try to find the magic flip-switch to cut the power to atrocity, and I introduce “The gospel according to The Picket Line:”

♇: Now, about those war crimes…

A Reader: Where did you get this Truman quote? “The denial of reality started early: President Truman, when he announced the bombing, called the city of Hiroshima ‘a military base’ that was chosen ‘because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.’ ”

♇: The quote is from his (I think) address to the nation about the bombing. I think that was the second of his public announcements about it. You can Google for it.

Reader: I liked your take on it. As I see it, the issue for people placed in Eichmann’s position is what do you do when your society, (which as your basic frame of reference for morality, norms, etc.) suddenly goes off its rocker? You really can’t protest, because you know where that’ll get you, Jew-lover, so you either play the game or you attempt to drop out of society completely. I think that the latter is very difficult for most to actualize. So the next best thing to do is find ways to fit the blinders.

♇: Eichmann isn’t a great example of what you’re talking about, I think, because he was so intimately involved in the logistics of the Holocaust that it’s hard to imagine he was anywhere near as passive or unenthused as he tries to represent.

Reader: Granted, not the best example.

♇: A better case might be the thousands of people who were also necessary to the process but at lower levels. Auschwitz was killing, what, 9,000 people a day or something? It takes a lot of people to do that.

Reader: Yep.

♇: And then, for the purposes of The Picket Line, there are the taxpayers, who were also essential to the process (assuming the Nazis didn’t just loot other countries to meet their revenue needs)… though I’m being far too bold to assume that I’d be courageous enough to go up against the Gestapo. You only get to wish you woulda unless you actually did.

Reader: Indeed. Another way of looking at it is that even though you find serious flaws with our government, at least you live in a country where you are offered a third option: To vent.

♇: Well, even in Nazi-occupied Europe people did resist, both actively and passively.

Reader: Schindler & the like, you mean?

♇: Yeah. There are lots of examples of people who put spanners in the works. And there are some who joined resistance movements, both violent and nonviolent, inside occupied territories. Denmark & France come to mind.

Reader: Well that’s Denmark & France — more to be expected. I mean, it’s not surprising to find resistance in occupied territories.

♇: But it’s not as though the Gestapo wasn’t just as mean there. Probably worse. So even when it gets as bad as it gets, there’s still the third path.

Reader: Sure… though at a much greater price.

♇: Well, Eichmann could have taken an honorable coward’s path and just have become progressively more inept until he was replaced or forced into retirement or some such. Chances are, he just plain liked his job. “Good pay, prominent position, nice uniform, gets you invited to good parties, you get to travel all over the Reich. Hate to give that up. I mean, they’d just replace me with someone else and nothing would really change anyway, right?”

Reader: Exactly.

♇: So how do people become essential participants in horrible, premeditated, deliberate, conscious cruelties like Auschwitz and Hiroshima without having the intention of being horrible or cruel, and how can this weird intellectual bypass be interrupted on an individual scale or on a larger scale? And when you’re finished with that one maybe you can help me decide whether God could create a rock so heavy that even He could not lift it.

Reader: You want to know how come Auschwitz and how come Hiroshima? How about this: Auschwitz was the end result of a botched job of patching Europe back together and coming up with a stable League of Nations after World War One, and Hiroshima came from the desire to win a war we didn’t start.

♇: Well, those are summaries of explanations of the way certain historical events played out, but I don’t think they have the same form as the answer to the question I’m trying to ask would have. There are a lot of paths that could have led from Versailles. One of them led to Auschwitz. I’m more interested in the way a person can voluntarily be an essential or at least very useful part of something awful and at the same time deny either choice or responsibility or both. Because it seems like this denial is necessary for participation, except for people who really are deliberately being assholes either mistakenly or out of malice, whom I’d like to think are in the minority.

Reader: Are you asking what’s hardwired in man, a seemingly intelligent species, that he’s capable of such wanton disregard for the ethical treatment of his fellow man when under great duress?

♇: Even when not under particularly great duress.

Reader: How about because deep down inside we like to believe we’re nice folk and that we’re on the good team?

♇: But actually being nice folk and fighting for the good team is what… too hard? too inconvenient? an opportunity that’s only available to the lucky? So we play make-believe as a booby prize?

Reader: I believe that most folk cannot distance themselves enough from their society to evaluate it objectively. Their society is “the good team.” Any holes that exist can easily be glossed over. (It beats trying to address that everything that you know is a lie — take the red pill, dude.) And there are folks who simply buy the party line: “Yes, I honestly believe that the world would be a better place without all them damn Jews. They’re not even human anyway.” Humanity sucks.

♇: Sure, but I’m thinking more of folks like the founder of the company I used to work for, who pulled that “our software will save innocent civilians by making war more informationish” stuff out of his justification bag, and then probably clapped his hands, spun around and believed it twice as hard for having said it to a reporter.

Reader: It’s because he doesn’t read The Picket Line.

♇: If it’s pointed out to him that he turns out to be wrong about that (and I’ve emailed him, but he doesn’t reply so I don’t know if he even reads ’em), he’ll probably just reach into his bag for another justification. And no amount of showing “well, actually that’s not factually correct” will help, because the justifications will just start getting less and less available to factual refutation until finally they’re like White House press conferences — sounding vaguely fact-like in their format but having no factual content at all. And yet, if you put ’em on the stand at a war crimes trial they’ll say “how could I have known — at the time everybody sincerely believed [insert nonsense here].”

Reader: It’s because he thinks he’s playing for the good guys. And the good guys report that smart bombs mean fewer civilian casualties. And he finds no need to further investigate the issue. I think you know the answer to the question you’re asking: It just sucks too much to accept an unpleasant reality when a pleasant orthodox fantasy is at your disposal.

♇: Doesn’t it suck worse to be suffering from hallucinations and being unable to match your actions and perceptions with the world around you?

Reader: No… I say the former sucks more. But good luck trying to convince people otherwise.

♇: If I don’t want to get a horrible toothache and have my teeth drilled, I can brush my teeth regularly or I can tell myself “my teeth are clean because there are magic gnomes who live in my mashed potatoes and clean my teeth while I’m sleeping.” Which one is more likely to fulfill my wants?

Reader: You’re assuming that people’s wants aren’t being met.

♇: Yeah — I think people want the U.S. to be a democracy, for instance. Well, if you want that, you’ll want to push your government toward democratic behavior. Or you can just say “the United States is the freest nation on earth” and stay in make-believe land.

Reader: People think they do live in a democracy, and a free-market economy for that matter.

♇: Do they want to live in a democracy do you think, or do they want to be able to say they live in a democracy? Maybe just the latter, eh?

Reader: The latter. The former takes too much effort. Low voter turnout isn’t just a reflection of voter dissatisfaction. It’s also because most people just don’t give a damn as long as their beer & gas are cheap.

♇: Would just saying “we have the cheapest beer and gas in the world” be good enough, or would the beer and gas actually have to be inexpensive?

Reader: I think in this case reality needs to match fantasy for it to work.

♇: So there are some wants at least that can’t be deflected into a fantasy world. How do we get the desire to be good or not to be a participant in mass murder into that category?

Reader: I think people have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about the bad stuff the government does with their money. “But what happens when they’re told?” you ask, and I respond, “they write it off as the ranting of a sissy liberal.”

♇: Well, if inexpensive gas matters, and just being able to say “this gas is inexpensive” without it actually being true isn’t good enough, then the way you respond to that is to actually investigate and find out what the price of gas is. You don’t wait for some activist to point it out to you.

Reader: But gas is cheap. That takes very little research to verify.

♇: Neither does “I am/am not acting like an asshole.”

Reader: I’ll bite — how does one know if one is acting like an asshole?

♇: “Hey, why don’t I drop my flavorless bubblegum here on the sidewalk? Woah, that would make me an asshole and I don’t want to be an asshole, ergo I won’t do it.” A psychopath, on the other hand, says “I will throw my gum on the sidewalk. This will make me an asshole. Hurray for that.” I’m worried about the third class of people who say, “I will throw my gum on the sidewalk. I don’t want to be an asshole. My throwing the gum on the sidewalk doesn’t make me an asshole because… uh, it never happened… or, well, it slipped out of my fingers… or, uh, well, there’s a lot of gum already on the sidewalk so one more piece won’t matter… or, well, nobody saw me do it, so…”

Reader: A person acting like an asshole and a nation acting like an asshole are two entirely different things. If the average Joe has little to no interest in politics, and so doesn’t know any better, why would he think that his country is acting inappropriately? Gas, after all, is cheap.

♇: I dunno; I think it starts at the individual level. If you don’t have respect for the truth or reality vis-a-vis your own actions and how you evaluate them, you’re going to be willing to fall for a well-worded and appealing fantasy description of your nation’s actions too.

Reader: I think we’re starting to talk past each other. Are you basically saying that one has to be immoral (or an asshole, to use the vernacular) to believe in one’s country?

♇: That’s not what I meant. What I’m saying is that if you use bad-faith fantasy evasions to justify your own behavioral deviations from your ideals, you will be more willing to accept the same sort of bad faith reasoning if it is applied to the actions of your country. If your country is doing something you can be proud of and you’re proud of it, what’s there to complain about? But if your country is doing something you’d be ashamed of if you admitted it was happening, and so you deny that it’s happening so you can continue to say you’re proud of it, that sucks.

Reader: What’s a “bad-faith fantasy evasion?”

♇: Something like the gum-thrower saying “well, there’s a lot of gum down there” or “my gum is particularly brightly-colored so people will see it and be able to step around it” or “it just slipped out of my fingers” or “nobody saw me do it.”

Reader: Ah. Well what if you’re someone who would be ashamed of your country if you knew the truth, but you just aren’t very politically aware?

♇: Well, there’s not being aware and then there’s sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling “LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU LA LA LA LA.”

Reader: I honestly believe that a lot of folk simply are not all that politically savvy. They buy what the talking heads say because the American history classes taught them everything they need to know to be proud of their country and that’s enough for them.

♇: What sort of pride in your country is it if it’s based on not looking too closely? “Son, I’m very proud of the way you played tonight.” “But you weren’t even at the game, Dad!” “Yes, but I’m sure you did very well.”

Reader: Are you searching for some magic flip-switch?

♇: Yep. I’m sure it’s around here somewhere. Where did I put the magic flip-switch?

Reader: It just doesn’t seem likely to me. Barring some sort of major disaster, nothing’s likely to cut through the haze on a national level. On a person by person basis, maybe, sure.

♇: So I shouldn’t lose sleep over not having found the magic switch, is what you’re saying? I think you’re right — it has to be person-by-person. You apply ethical standards to yourself first — not a particular set of Thou Shalt Not morals, but just an agreement with yourself that if you catch yourself hiding behind some bad faith baloney you’ll stop and confront yourself honestly about it. Then you start expecting the same from people around you. If enough people see the value in this, suddenly when a politician goes “blah blah blah” it won’t work anymore. I’m no saint, but every day I try to be a little more honest with myself and I think that’s valuable.

Reader: In general, I like to believe that I live that kind of life. Granted, I own an SUV and I pay taxes that support a foreign policy agenda I disagree with.

♇: Ask yourself why you own an SUV and why you pay taxes, and throw out all of the bullshit reasons that only sound good because you know they’d work on the talk shows. Then you’ll either find out that sure enough you’ve got a set of values that don’t conflict with taxpaying and SUV-owning or you’ll find out that you’re doing those things against your own best interests.

Reader: Perhaps. I believe that there are a lot of good folk out there whose worst crime is not flexing their critical thought muscle. There are plenty of good people who simply don’t do the research. That doesn’t make them bad people.

♇: Nobody’s omniscient. That’d be a ridiculous standard. But there’s ignorance, and then there’s “willful ignorance” which is one of those bad faith things, one of the easiest and worst. It played big at Nuremberg. “Why, I had no idea all those Jews were being butchered!” “800,000 of them disappeared from the region you administered. Did you ask where they went?” “Didn’t occur to me.” “Page 1234 of Mein Kampf talks about what Hitler planned to do to the Jews. Did you read it?” “Well, everybody read it, but…”

Reader: Again, I think cheap beer & gas is the problem. If the problems were in our backyard, matters would be addressed, methinks.

♇: Sure, people might start getting up in arms if the economy takes another bad tumble, or Iraq gets much worse, or inflation goes crazy or whatever. But what good is something like that? If people just trade their unthinking “everything is great” blinders for another set of blinders, we’re no more likely to be better than worse off in the aftermath of their agitation.

Reader: Yep. They’ll be complacent again once the dust settles.

♇: You gotta start with the individual, again. “Hey you, got any idea of what a good person is? Wanna be a good person? Okay, first thing you gotta do is keep an eye on yourself and see if you’re acting like a good person or an asshole. When you start acting like an asshole, stop, then back up and be straight with yourself about where you went wrong. Lather, rinse, repeat.” The gospel according to The Picket Line. Thank you, and please tip the folks who brought the loaves and fishes.

At How to Save the World, Dave Pollard explores the role of imagination and storytelling in shaping the contours of your life and your effect on the world:

Courage, imagination, dissatisfaction, and willingness to make a commitment to yourself. If you have these four qualities, your future story is waiting to be written. Leave it unwritten, or let others write it for you, and you will merely get to where you are already headed. Write your own story, and you just might find you’re on your way to What Could Be.

More from the pen of Leo Tolstoy:

Tolstoy’s writings on tax refusal can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

In order that people who do not want war should not fight, it is not necessary to have either international law, arbitration, international tribunals, or solutions of problems; but it is merely necessary that those who are subjected to the deceit should awake and free themselves from the spell or enchantment under which they find themselves. The way to do away with war is for those who do not want war, who regard participation in it as a sin, to refrain from fighting.…

But the enlightened friends of peace not only refrain from recommending this method, but cannot bear the mention of it; when it is brought before them they pretend not to have noticed it, or, if they cannot help noticing it, they gravely shrug their shoulders and express their pity for those uneducated and unreasonable men who adopt such an ineffectual, silly method, when such a good one exists — namely, to sprinkle salt on the bird one wishes to catch, i.e. to persuade the governments, who only exist by violence and deceit, to forsake both the one and the other.…

No one can help desiring that his life should not be an aimless and useless existence, but that it should be of service to God and man; yet frequently a man spends his life without finding an opportunity for such service. The summons to accept the military service presents precisely such an opportunity to every man of our time.

Every man, in refusing to take part in military service or to pay taxes to a government which uses them for military purposes, is, by this refusal, rendering a great service to God and man, for he is thereby making use of the most efficacious means of furthering the progressive movement of mankind toward that better social order which it is striving after and must eventually attain.…

Awake, brethren! Listen neither to those villains who, from your childhood, infect you with the diabolic spirit of patriotism, opposed to righteousness and truth, and only necessary in order to deprive you of your property, your freedom, and your human dignity; nor to those ancient impostors who preach war in the name of a cruel and vindictive God invented by them, and in the name of a perverted and false Christianity; nor, even less, to those modern Sadducees who, in the name of science and civilization, aiming only at the continuation of the present state of things, assemble at meetings, write books, and make speeches, promising to organize a good and peaceful life for people without their making any effort! Do not believe them. Believe only the consciousness which tells you that you are neither beasts nor slaves, but free men, responsible for your actions, and therefore unable to be murderers either of your own accord or at the will of those who live by these murders.

From Carthago Delenda Est.

The growing respectability of torture in the United States and its coming legalization, among other things, have sent me back to Hannah Arendt to look for some recommendations for how to proceed.

She was a refugee from, and a student of, a time and place in which

…the few rules and standards according to which men used to tell right from wrong, and which were invoked to judge or justify others and themselves, and whose validity were supposed to be self-evident to every sane person either as a part of divine or of natural law.… without much notice… collapsed almost overnight, and then it was as though morality suddenly stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with hardly more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people.

And she put a lot of effort into trying to understand how this happened, and what, if anything, we can do to interrupt it. I’ve lately been reading a collection of her writings called Responsibility and Judgment in which much of the material directly attacks this problem, and most of the rest at least touches on it.

The most and greatest evil, Arendt believes, is not done by wicked or evil people, but “by people who never made up their mind to be either bad or good” — “by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

Such people, in times when the conventional morality that serves societies reasonably well most of the time goes through a polar shift in which the “thou shalt not”s become “thou shalt”s, go along to get along — having no habit of using anything but conventional morality as a guide.

This evil — “banal” evil as she famously put it — is committed, according to her theory, by people who do not think. This isn’t to say that these people are not intelligent, or cultured,1 or knowledgeable. “Thinking” has a particular meaning in Arendt’s framework: it is a process of internal dialog, one that is necessarily done in withdrawal from society and real-world concerns (that is, you can’t think at the same time you are working or conversing). This withdrawal she calls “solitude” but it is a solitude that you share with yourself in a peculiar duality that enables the dialog to take place: you split in two and converse with yourself.

Thinking is not a method for determining hard-and-fast eternal truths about good & evil, but is a process of doubting and testing. It is related to remembering, in that if you think over what you have done and try to fit it into your life story, this is one way of remembering it. In contrast, if you do not think, and therefore forget your own actions, you are capable of doing anything “just as my courage would be absolutely reckless if pain, for instance, were an experience immediately forgotten.” … “The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back.”

If you do not think, you are “rootless” — at the mercy of the winds that might blow you into some new, pathological moral convention. It’s not necessarily the case that having roots means that you’re wisely-rooted, but it does mean that you have a stake in your own personality and self-imposed limits on what you are capable of doing. Without these roots, you have no limits, you are capable of anything, and your own character is a matter of indifference to you. In short: you are dangerous.

Thinking, which is to say being in dialog with yourself, is what gives you this stake in your own character — it “results in conscience as its by-product.” You don’t want to be spending your time in dialog with a monster: “If I do wrong I am condemned to live together with a wrongdoer in an unbearable intimacy.” This is of such importance that, as Socrates put it, it is better to be wronged than to do wrong.2

Arendt admits that while this may sound like a nice aphorism, its opposite seems more plausible. But “while many prefer to do wrong for their own benefit rather than suffer wrong, no one will prefer to live together with a thief or a murderer or a liar. This is what people forget who praise the tyrant who has come into power through murder and fraud.”

But here this “living together with” metaphor seems to be stretched too far.

If conscience is a by-product of thinking, because thinking includes this need to live in harmony with ourselves — that is if we are not expected to have some sort of pre-existing moral yardstick available through reason or divine revelation or what have you — then why do I not want to live in harmony with a self who is a murderer or a thief? The reason why I do not want to live with a murderer, assuming I do not have a pre-existing moral yardstick by which I judge murder to be wrong, is because I’m afraid of being murdered; I don’t want to live with a thief because I don’t want to be robbed; and I don’t want to live with a liar because I do not want to be deceived. But you’re not going to rob or murder yourself, and if you lie to yourself you may believe with some justification that you are doing this to your own advantage. Why would you not want to live with yourself as a liar, thief, or murderer unless you already held these things in contempt, in which case the whole exercise of trying to determine who you would be willing to live with as a way of bootstrapping your moral judgment seems beside-the-point.

The living-with-a-liar thing seems to be the crucial part: if you live with a liar, you cannot trust the inner dialog with which, by thinking, you pursue the truth you presumably love. Perhaps if you love truth, and therefore do not lie to yourself, an abhorrence for murder and theft will necessarily follow.

I see another problem: if this need to live in harmony with yourself is so vitally important that you would rather suffer wrong than commit it, rather be murdered than murder, rather drink hemlock than go into dishonorable exile, and so forth, then it seems likely that this will override any but the most extreme love of truth. If you and the self you are in dialog with can achieve this crucial harmony by agreeing to a comfortable lie, and the alternative is to be in disharmony over an uncomfortable truth, what’s holding you back from embracing the lie?

This love of truth and this need to live in harmony with yourself also seem so rare to me that the question of how to encourage them seems no easier than the question we started with — how to discourage people from participating in bureaucratic massacre and the like. How do you encourage people to love truth or to strive for integrity?

For that matter, where did I get the crazy idea that it is wrong to torture someone? Is such a notion even really part of my character, or is it some custom that I have rootlessly blown up against and that I am vulnerable to being swept away from in a change of wind?

In truth, I am most repulsed by torture in the abstract and the less I know of the victims and perpetrators and of the perpetrators’ motives. As things get more specific, I can get frightened (if I imagine myself or those I love being tortured) or I can even take some delight in the thought (if I imagine, say, Attorney General Gonzalez getting some first-hand experience of some of the techniques he’s helped to provide legal cover for).

Maybe my expressions of moral revulsion around torture are a sort of gambit — an attempt at prompting reciprocal altruism. I make an explicit promise to eschew torture even when I may be indifferent or hostile to its victims in the hopes that this will encourage other people to behave the same way to me and those I love.

Doesn’t seem like this would make much headway. Pious incantations of the Golden Rule or the Categorical Imperative are easily made — enforcing reciprocal altruism requires a lot more, including being able to verify and observe and monitor those you’re reciprocating with.

So I’d have to believe that these incantations have some powerful persuasive force all their own, without an effective mechanism of enforcement. Perhaps I can claim to have the force of Reason on my side (lord knows, many a philosopher has tried), or, even more persuasively, the Word of God. Socrates himself made a nod in this direction, suggesting that the mass of people who do not think, and therefore cannot self-generate moral behavior, must be held in line by a myth of a final judgment and threats of eternal punishment.

Such things have been tried with at best limited success, but nobody with half a brain really believes them (though many profess them). We “are committed (it would seem) to think of conscience as an organ that will react without hope for rewards and without fear of punishment.”

Nietzsche would call this appeal to morality a gambit of the weak — if you think you can impose your preferences by force, you have no need to appeal to some universal standard of right and wrong, you just do your thing; on the other hand, if you are defenseless, big talk may be all you’ve got.

Moral behavior might, however, be a kind of demonstration of strength. In the same way that a bird with colorful feathers is advertising to potential mates that it has plenty of resources to waste on bright plumage (and so it must be one fit and clever bird) — a person who engages in moral living is announcing a cocky unconcern for the loss of whatever advantages come from being immoral or amoral. In contrast, for a person who really is in a position of weakness — someone whose children are starving, or someone addicted to drugs — morality is an expensive luxury.

Clarence Marsh Case, in The Social Psychology of Passive Resistance, points out that Franklin Henry Giddings had made this argument in his Democracy and Empire: “Not less are all the higher virtues — philanthropy, compassion, and forgiveness — manifestations of power… Moreover, it is only the men that have energy to spare who are normally altruistic. On the physiological side, altruism is a mode of expenditure of any surplus energy that has been left over from successful individual struggle. The meek shall inherit the earth, not because they are meek, but because, taking one generation with another, it is only the mighty that are or can be meek, and because the mighty — if normally evolved — are also by differentiation meek.” Giddings is here explicitly responding to Nietzsche.

―♇

But that’s all very speculative. Assuming morality and moral philosophy aren’t just some sort of fang-flashing, and if you aren’t buying the questionable moral foundations perennially discovered in Reason or God, what is there to keep you interested in ideas of right and wrong? What motive do you have to evaluate your own actions by this sort of standard?

I’ve toyed with the idea that in life we have one shot to be the sort of person we admire, and that this is motivation enough:

Nothing matters, ultimately, except to the extent that we decide that it matters. No God will fill out a performance evaluation for me. I won’t be reincarnated as a prince or a lamprey. Our suffering and triumph means nothing in the greater scheme of things. Cruel and evil people prosper and then die old and satisfied in their sleep while innocent children have their arms ripped off by bombs and die of dysentery. Neither get redemptions from a heavenly accountant — from the perspective of eternity, their books are already balanced and their accounts are of no account. My bones will crumble to dust in no time at all, and my name will be forgotten as quickly. And I am going to try to be a good person anyway because that’s what I want to do with my life.

But I still found myself relying on what I called “an ethical ‘sixth sense’ ” — this mysterious conscience. But of today’s villains, the torturers and terrorists and demagogues, who’s to say they don’t have their own sixth sense or that they aren’t enacting the character they admire? Arendt said that this “sixth sense” is misleading: “these feelings indicate conformity and nonconformity, they don’t indicate morality.”:

Conscience supposedly is a way of feeling beyond reason and argument and of knowing through sentiment what is right and wrong. What has been revealed beyond doubt, I think, is the fact that such feelings indeed exist, that people feel guilty or feel innocent, but that alas, these feelings are no reliable indications, are in fact no indications at all, of right and wrong.

But at some point I must feel that I wouldn’t want to live with myself if I were to do X, Y, or Z. Why wouldn’t I want to live with a torturer? Because I would feel guilty, I would be repulsed at myself, all of this because of this same unreliable ethical sixth sense. I also can’t help but feel that there are reasons why some things are right and others wrong that lie outside of me — it would be wrong for me to torture someone because of something to do with them, not just something to do with me. Could it really be that there is nothing more at stake in moral questions than my own opinion of myself?

  1. Though Arendt claims that among the Nazis, none of “these highly cultivated murderers… wrote a poem worth remembering or a piece of music worth listening to or painted a picture that anybody would care to hang on his walls… [because] no gifts will withstand the loss of integrity which you lose when you have lost this most common capacity for thought and remembrance.”
  2. Arendt believes this to be an entirely negative standard — that is it only tells you what you cannot do not what you should do. In other words, I cannot do X because I could not live with an X-doer. I don’t understand why you cannot just as easily think something like “I couldn’t live with someone who would neglect the opportunity to do Y or who would fail to do my Z obligation.”

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Honor Code

Every once in a while, a moral revolution takes place, and practices that were once con­sid­ered or­di­nary, un­con­tro­ver­si­al, or even honorable, come to be seen as rep­re­hen­si­ble. Slavery is a classic example. Here’s a summary of that moral revo­lu­tion from Adam Hochschild:

[P]icture the world as it existed in . Well over three-quarters of the people on earth are in bondage of one land or another. In parts of the Americas, slaves far outnumber free people. African slaves are also scattered widely through much of the Islamic world. Slavery is routine in most of Africa itself. In India and other parts of Asia, some people are outright slaves, others in debt bondage that ties them to a particular landlord as harshly as any slave to a Southern plantation owner. In Russia the majority of the population are serfs. Nowhere is slavery more firmly rooted than in Britain’s overseas empire, where some half-million slaves are being systematically worked to an early death growing West Indian sugar. Caribbean slave-plantation fortunes underlie many a powerful dynasty… One of the most prosperous sugar plantations on Barbados is owned by the Church of England. Furthermore, Britain’s ships dominate the slave trade, delivering tens of thousands of chained captives each year to French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies as well as to its own.

If you had proposed, in the London of early , to change all of this, nine out of ten people would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The 10th might have admitted that slavery was unpleasant but said that to end it would wreck the British Empire’s economy. It would be as if, today, you maintained that the automobile must go. One in ten listeners might agree that the world would be better off if we traveled instead by foot, bicycle, electric train, or trolley, but are you suggesting a political movement to ban cars? Come on, be serious! Looking back, however, what is even more surprising than slavery’s scope is how swiftly it died. By the end of the 19th century, slavery was, at least on paper, outlawed almost everywhere.

How do such magnificent moral revolutions happen? Kwame Anthony Appiah thinks it has to do with changing definitions of honor, and he’s written a book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen to present this idea.

Appiah looks at three such moral revolutions: the abolition of the enslavement of Africans in the British empire, the end of duelling among British gentlemen, and the end of foot-binding of upper-class Chinese women. And he looks at one that’s in-progress or at least impatiently awaited: the end of “honor killings” of women in Pakistan and other parts of that region.

In each case, he shows that ideas of honor were core parts of the ideology that supported the practice in question, and that these ideas shifted over time so that honor became instead identified with the abolition of the practice.

He further asserts that this shift of the understanding of honor was at the core of the moral revolution and that it was the driving force behind making the moral revolution happen.

To me, though, it seemed that Appiah was not able to give these last two points sufficient support. That these moral revolutions were accompanied by a shift in how honor was correlated with the practices being revolutionized is kind of interesting, but also almost tautological. That this shift preceded or drove the moral revolution rather than just accompanied or was the result of it is a much more interesting thesis but requires more evidence than Appiah provides to be convincing.

I’m sympathetic to this idea and think it has promise, and I like Appiah’s work and his focus (see also my brief review of his Experiments in Ethics a few years back). I hope he continues to pursue his quest for what makes moral revolutions happen and comes up with something more rigorous.

I’m also curious about what causes revolutionary moral backslidings, in which formerly-reprehensible acts like murder (e.g. Nazi Germany) or torture (e.g. contemporary United States) gain or regain respectability. Also, what of moral revolutions that aren’t so magnificent (temperance/prohibition in the United States, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Cultural Revolution in China) — what distinguishes these from the ones that are on-track? is there a way to know ahead of time? are there ways to keep moral revolutions from going astray?

I’ve been working with a bad case of writer’s block for about a week now. I have an idea that I think is important but I’m having a hard time articulating it even to myself, and I’ve got a lot of fragments and false starts and not much else to show for it so far. I hope that if I can find a “hook” that the pieces will start to come together, and at the same time I explain myself to you I’ll also get a better grip on the topic myself. So far, no dice.

Radical honesty has been advocated by a variety of revolutionary thinkers, for example Václav Havel, Leo Tolstoy, Allen Ginsberg, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and Jeff Knaebel.

Part of what I’m trying to get at is the idea that practical ethics is hard (as opposed to theoretical ethics, which is also hard, but in an academic way) and that in spite of this, and in spite of how important it is, there seems to be little in the way of a culture that encourages ethical development or a discipline of ethical training and practice that people can dive in to in order to get better at it. People are largely on their own.

Which leads to some interesting experimentation. Lindsey Fox has decided to pay especially close attention to honesty and authenticity this year, by vowing to tell no lies — not even little white lies — all year, and documenting what she discovers at her blog, The Soulful Contrarian.

Aristotle noted that ethics differs from other branches of philosophy, “in not being a subject of merely intellectual interest — I mean we are not concerned to know what goodness essentially is, but how we are to become good people, for this alone gives the study its practical value.” This did not turn out to be a good prediction of how this branch of philosophy would develop in the philosophical tradition that followed Aristotle in the West.

Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World

Another philosophical tradition was nurtured in India several hundred years after Aristotle’s time, at Nālandā university, and was very influential to the philosophy associated with Mahayana Buddhism, for instance the Gelug-pa sect of Tibetan Buddhism of which Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, is a world-renowned spiritual leader. In his new book, Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World, he sketches an ethical philosophy worthy of Aristotle’s description. I’ll try to summarize it today.

The Dalai Lama is not skilled in English, but this book has been very lucidly and precisely translated by Thupten Jinpa, and so although it deals with some subtle and difficult psychological and philosophical concepts, the language barrier does not present difficulties.

Secular Ethics

In the first half of the book, the Dalai Lama outlines his understanding of ethics and why he thinks that secular ethics in particular is a thing worth pursuing.

Ethics, in his view, does not need to be grounded in religious practice or in a religious belief system, though he finds religion valuable and thinks that it can add to our understanding of ethics. By secular ethics he doesn’t mean ethics that is anti-religious, but merely not religious — potentially parallel to but not based on religion. Such an ethics is potentially more powerful than religious ethics because it can make universal claims that might appeal to people across cultures regardless of their religious affiliations, and it can also appeal to people who are nonreligious.

The Dalai Lama believes that a secular ethics can be built on two fundamental principles:

  1. all people share a common human experience
  2. we are all linked in a dense web of interdependence

The general conclusion to draw from this is that one cannot be aloof from one’s fellows, and that the natural and proper outlook towards them ought to be one of empathy (since they are like us) from which follows compassion.

The Pursuit of Happiness

One part of human experience that we all share is that we are largely motivated by the avoidance of suffering and the pursuit of happiness. In this, we’re all in the same boat. This common ground is such an important part of our natures, and so universal, that it is potentially a stronger and fundamental bond than the various things that divide us, like nationality, race, language, class, ideology and so forth.

Given that avoidance of suffering and pursuit of happiness are so fundamental, the Dalai Lama (like Aristotle before him), delves into what happiness consists of. Some components of happiness are wealth, health, and friendship. But it seems to be more complex than that, since it is easy to find examples of people who have an excess of any or all of these things and are still unhappy, or where people have a lack of any or all of these things and are still content. There seems to be something deeper involved, a sort of internal attitude towards what fortune brings us, that is the real key to happiness. In various parts of this discussion, this is translated as “peace of mind,” “inner peace,” “inner resilience,” “inner strength,” and “mental composure.”

The more you have this, the happier you will be, and though the more transient things like wealth, health, and friendship are also helpful — in moderation — they can actually be harmful to the happiness of people without this variety of inner peace, since — especially in excess — such things can provoke a kind of craving or anticipatory insecurity that induces suffering.

Two other things that are important to genuine happiness are

  1. a sense of purpose
  2. a feeling of connectedness

Compassion

Empathy is natural to people. We seek out situations in which we can observe others or hear about their lives in such a way that we can empathetically feel some degree of their sorrows and triumphs. Much of our social life concerns this, and also much of literature, drama, film, television, and the like.

We are hard-wired to feel empathy, and also compassion. The Dalai Lama thinks this may be partially because we are helpless for such a long period (relative to other species) as infants. We are only alive as adults because someone was patient and compassionate enough to take care of us when we were young. Without a strong mechanism for empathy and compassion somewhere in our minds, our species wouldn’t last long.

And this isn’t restricted to the parent/child context, of course. We frequently seek out compassion from others, and we also may find it satisfying to show compassion. The first beneficiary of the compassion that we show for others, perhaps unintuitively, is ourself. This is partially because compassion is a good avenue for acquiring the sense of purpose and feeling of connectedness that the Dalai Lama suggests are important to genuine happiness. He also asserts that compassion “reduces our fear, boosts our confidence… brings us inner strength… [and] gives us respite from our own difficulties.” It can also contribute to health and friendship, two of the earlier-mentioned components of transient happiness.

So, while compassion is other-focused, it is also in our own individual (enlightened) self interest — what he calls “wise selfishness,” in contrast to short-sighted or narrowly-focused “foolish selfishness.”

Our natural, ingrained compassion is typically limited in scope — it applies most strongly to those closest to us (family, close friends), and fades off as people become more distant, less well-known, and less similar in superficial attributes like accent, custom, and race. It is often also conditional on reciprocity or on the recipients of our compassion going along with our plans.

A second, more universal and unconditional form of compassion is based on the object of compassion’s personhood itself — that universal part of human nature we all share, such as our common avoidance of suffering and pursuit of happiness — without regard to who they are or what they’re up to. This sort of compassion doesn’t come naturally but must be deliberately cultivated.

Compassion and Justice

The sort of compassion-centered ethics that the Dalai Lama is building is sometimes attacked by people who prefer a justice-centered ethics. Compassion promotes tolerance and forgiveness and discourages retribution, and so the critics believe that it tends to work to the advantage of unjust wrongdoers and thereby increases the amount of injustice in the world.

The Dalai Lama responds to this by saying that the sort of compassion he is promoting is not meant to be a meek, turn-the-other-cheek variety, but a strong and sometimes confrontational one — something like Gandhi’s program, I think.

He does counsel nonviolence, and a “hate the sin but love the sinner” attitude toward wrongdoers. This would not satisfy critics who think that retribution is a valid goal of justice, but it does leave the other commonly-cited objectives — deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and restitution — available.

A compassionate approach to wrongdoers has the advantage that it leaves open the possibility for reconciliation and reform. An approach that prioritizes vengeance or retribution tends to restrict the outcomes to either vanquishing a resentful foe, or failing to do so and thereby inviting further retributive injustice — neither of which bode well for the future.

Forgiveness is an important part of this. It comes from this distinguishing the deed from the doer, but also from imagining how you look at yourself when you have done something wrong that you regret — unless you’re unhealthily neurotic, you don’t identify yourself with your misdeed and you don’t think of yourself as permanently tainted by your sin.

Motives or Consequences?

In the Dalai Lama’s framework, ethics is largely a matter of the motives you have when you take action, rather than of the actual consequences of the action. Consequences are too subject to unpredictable factors to be a firm basis for ethics.

But good intentions alone are not enough. You must also cultivate “discernment” in order to translate your good intentions into beneficial actions. This means learning what actions are really beneficial, what consequences are most likely to follow from certain actions, and so forth. Only reality-based good intentions are really compassionate.

But on a day-to-day basis, you make far too many decisions to subject each of them to careful scrutiny and to follow all of your actions forward through all of their possible consequences. For this reason, you should develop ethical heuristics that can carry some of the weight — that way, when you do encounter situations that require careful ethical discernment, you will have enough mental energy to do the job. (You may recognize this as also a line of thought Adam Smith’s pursued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.)

There will be times when your ethical heuristics aren’t up to the task — for example, when they contradict each other in a moral dilemma. Here is how the Dalai Lama uses discernment to find the best way forward in such cases:

I always start by checking my motivation. Do I truly have others’ well-being at heart? Am I under the sway of any disturbing emotions, such as anger, impatience, or hostility? Having determined that my motivation is sound, I then look carefully at the situation in context. What are the underlying causes and conditions that have given rise to it? What choices do I have? What are their likely outcomes? And which course of action, on balance, is most likely to yield the greatest long-term benefit for others? Making decisions in this way, I find, means they are not the cause of any regret later on.

From here, he briefly mentions some pressing global issues, in a fairly superficial way. His point though, is that in each case, what may seem like structural problems in our institutions and governments and such are really ethical problems in the people who make up these bodies, and that we aren’t going to solve these problems with changes at the organizational level unless people become more ethically educated and motivated. (And who is educating and training people in ethics these days? It seems like just about everybody has dropped the ball.)

How to Cultivate Ethics

Part two of the book is more of a practical how-to. How does one develop compassion and discernment?

The Dalai Lama believes that it is a three-stage process, with each stage building on the one before it:

  1. restraint — don’t harm others
  2. virtue — cultivate positive values
  3. altruism — live selflessly

These three things apply to our actions, thoughts, and motives. The tools we can use to achieve these stages are heedfulness, mindfulness, and awareness. Heedfulness is a sort of state of alert and caution, knowing that we may have habits or tendencies to violate these goals of restraint, virtue, and altruism, and that we need to be on guard. Mindfulness seems to mean keeping these goals in mind and seeing how they apply to whatever situation we are in. Awareness is a sort of introspection with the design of rooting out impediments to self-control.

“Conscience,” as an independent mental faculty that acts as a sort of ethical lodestone, is something unfamiliar to Dalai Lama’s philosophical heritage, he says. In its place is a conscientiousness motivated by self-respect and by consideration of others’ opinions. These respond to personal misdeeds in a way analogous to “conscience” — self-respect says “this deed is unworthy of me” and consideration-of-others says “and I’ll be poorly thought-of for doing it.”

Destructive Emotions and Drives

People are motivated by a variety of emotions and drives. Most of these are healthy in moderation but can cause problems if they become pathologically exaggerated. Others, like hatred, are not good even in small amounts. The destructive emotions (or exaggerations of otherwise-healthy emotions) come in three categories:

  1. anger (e.g. hatred, enmity, malice, irritation, agitation, hostility, temper)
  2. attachment (e.g. greed, lust, craving, desire)
  3. mixed (e.g. envy, jealousy, pride, intolerance, prejudice, anxiety, guilt)

All destructive emotions share the trait of distorting our perception and of making it more difficult for us to practice virtues like compassion. What can we do about this?

First off, we can adopt a mental attitude of opposition to destructive emotion — which is more easily done when you reflect on their negative consequences — and we can cultivate certain antidotes. “For example, the main antidote for anger is forbearance, for greed is contentment, for fear is courage, and for doubt [such as anxiety or guilt] is understanding.” Other examples are patience, self-discipline, generosity, and forgiveness (the Dalai Lama describes some of these virtues in detail). Most important is compassion, which can cover a multitude of sins.

And secondly, we can further develop our emotional awareness. This means learning the triggers that set off destructive emotions, our emotional habits, how to recognize the physiological signs of being under the influence of destructive emotions, and so forth.

How to Get from Here to There

All of this may seem easier said than done. In the final chapter of his book, the Dalai Lama lets us in on the secret. Becoming more ethical, like learning other difficult skills, takes attentive practice and a lot of time. The practice he recommends is meditation, and he suggests and very briefly sketches several varieties of meditation that strengthen particular skills (like heedfulness, mindfulness, and awareness) that are important to ethical development.

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

—Robert Frost
from Build Soil

Today, instead of dredging up something from the archives about historical tax resistance campaigns and movements, I want to spend some time looking at individual tax resistance in service of what Ammon Hennacy called the “one-man* revolution.”

Whether Hennacy got the name from Frost’s poem, or Frost from him, or whether each came up with it independently, I don’t know. The idea goes back much further than either, and in particular is especially pronounced in Thoreau’s thinking.

This idea is that, 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 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 and practical thing you can do.

“One-man revolution” is the answer to the question posed by radicals and reformers who feel overwhelmed by the task ahead. “What can one person do?” they ask (half-hoping, I suspect, 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 one-man revolutionary says: no, the revolution starts here and now. Your first task as a revolutionary is to overturn the corrupt, confused, puppet governor of your own life and to put a more responsible sovereign in its place.

As to what the policies of this new sovereign ought to be, well, that’s up to you. I’m not going to cover the details of how Hennacy’s and Thoreau’s one-man revolutions played out and what specific decisions they made along the way. Today instead I’m going to look at the reasons they gave for why the one-man revolution is practical and effective, in answer to the “What can just one person do?” skeptics.

These reasons can be roughly divided into five categories:

  1. With the one-man 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 need to water down your message to try 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 makes you more effective and far-reaching than those revolutionaries who always have to check to see if the rest of the pack is still with them.
  3. Political revolutions that are not also accompanied by individual revolutions don’t make enduring radical change — they just change the faces of the clowns running the circus while leaving the corrupt structure intact.
  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 that character.
  5. By fighting the one-man revolution, you are not as alone as you may think you are: you “leaven the loaf” and cause all society to rise, you attract other one-man revolutionaries to your side, and you sow the seeds that inspire others.

You can win the one-man revolution

Ammon Hennacy’s theory of the one-man revolution crystallized, appropriately enough, while he was being held in solitary confinement. He’d been sentenced for promoting draft evasion during World War Ⅰ and then thrown in “the hole” for leading a hunger strike of prisoners to protest awful food. Because he refused to name names, he was kept there for several months.

Locked up alone in a cell 24/7, unable to communicate with his comrades in the prison or outside, given the silent treatment by the guard, and overhearing the day-in day-out torture of the inmate in the adjoining cell — this was not the most promising situation for a revolutionary.

The only book they allowed him was the Bible (and they even took this away and replaced it with a smaller-print version for no other reason but to inflict another petty torment in the dim light of his cell). In the course of reading and reflecting on what he read — particularly the Sermon on the Mount — he decided that the revolution could be fought and won even where he stood.

To change the world by bullets or ballots was a useless procedure. …the only revolution worthwhile was the one-man revolution within the heart. Each one could make this by himself and not need to wait on a majority.

(A few days back I saw a bumper sticker that read “Jesus was a community organizer.” But if you read the Sermon on the Mount, you won’t see any organizing going on there at all — Jesus is urging people individually to get their lives in order so that their deeds will be like a light shining before others to inspire them. Do you see any “we must,” “we ought to,” “we should work together to,” or “once there are enough of us” in that sermon? Jesus isn’t addressing an organization but an assembly.)

You can start now, with full integrity

Lloyd Danzeisen expressed one of the advantages of the one-man revolution in a letter to Hennacy: “You are lucky and of course very wise to be a ‘one man revolution,’ for you do not have to discuss your action over and over again (with committees) but can swing into action.”

The advantage of organizing and working together is superior numbers, and, in theory anyway, greater force. But there are many disadvantages. It takes a lot of time and negotiation to get a bunch of people to take action together, and usually this also involves finding some lowest common denominator of principle or risk that they can all agree on — which can mean watering down the core of what you’re fighting for until it seems less like a principle than a petty grievance.

What such a movement gains in quantity it may lose in quality, and the force it gains from numbers it may lose from the diffuse, blunted, half-hearted effort of the individuals that make it up, or from the fact that much of their energy is expended in the organizing itself rather than the ostensible goals of the organization.

The advantage of drawing a large crowd of half-hearted followers is rarely worth the effort. It is not too hard to sway a crowd of wishy-washy people by appealing to the half-truths they already believe and being careful not to attack any of the nonsense they adhere to. But what does this get you? A crowd of wishy-washy people who are just as vulnerable to falling for the next demagogue who comes along with patronizing speeches. Instead, Hennacy recommends, we should “appeal to those about ready to make the next step and… know that these are very few indeed.… We can live and die and never change political trends but if we take a notion, we can change our own lives in many basic respects and thus do that much to change society.”

Thoreau wrote of how when he was invited to speak he refused to water down his message to make it most palatable to his listeners. He wasn’t aiming for the sympathy of the crowd, but hoped to reach that one or two who were ready to be challenged: “I see the craven priest looking for a hole to escape at — alarmed because it was he that invited me thither — & an awful silence pervades the audience. They think they will never get me there again. But the seed has not all fallen in stony & shallow ground.”

Thoreau noted with approval that the abolitionist revolutionary John Brown had not gathered around him a large party of well-wishers and collaborators, but instead had been very selective about whom he let in on his plans:

I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have had him wait till that time came? — till you and I came over to him?

The very fact that [Brown] had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes. His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster. He would have no rowdy or swaggerer, no profane swearer, for, as he said, he always found these men to fail at last. He would have only men of principle, & they are few.

He quotes Brown as saying:

I would rather have the small-pox, yellow-fever, and cholera, all together in my camp, than a man without principle.… Give me men of good principles, — God-fearing men, — men who respect themselves, and with a dozen of them I will oppose any hundred such men as these Buford ruffians.

A one-man revolutionary is more effective and harder to defeat

A one-man revolutionary — a “man of good principles” — is individually more effective and harder to defeat than that same person would be as part of a movement. This may seem paradoxical to people who are used to thinking in terms of “strength in numbers” or “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

This is for two related reasons:

First, because as a one-man revolutionary you are self-motivated, you do not get thrown into confusion if the lines of communication down the chain of command are disrupted, and you don’t lose momentum by looking about to check if your comrades are still with you or if they have retreated or surrendered.

And second, because this makes it difficult for your opponents to get a foothold in trying to persuade you with threats or with bribes to give up the fight.

For example, Hennacy tells of one of his captors trying to trick him:

Detective Wilson said that the young Socialists arrested with me for refusing to register had all given in and registered. (Later I found out that he had also told them that I had registered.) [But] I felt that if they gave in, someone had to stick, and I was that one.

The detective assumed that Hennacy valued his belonging more than his integrity, and so made a completely ineffective attack. Thoreau similarly noted that his captors had failed to understand his motives, assuming he valued his freedom from confinement more than his freedom of action:

It costs me less in ev­ery sense to in­cur the pen­alty of dis­o­be­di­ence to the State, than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.

I saw that, if there was a wall of stone be­tween me and my towns­men, there was a still more dif­fi­cult one to climb or break through, be­fore they could get to be as free as I was.… In ev­ery threat and in ev­ery com­pli­ment there was a blun­der; for they thought that my chief de­sire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.

People often draw the wrong conclusion from the success of the “divide and conquer” tactic when used by governments against opposition movements. The lesson proved by this is not that unless we stay united we are weak, but that to the extent that our strength depends mainly on our unity we are vulnerable.

Without the one-man revolution, no other revolution is worth the trouble

The problem with the mass, popular, peasants-with-pitchforks sort of revolution is that it’s so unreliable. You put everything on the line, shed buckets of blood, endure betrayals and unfriendly alliances and hard compromises, and finally (if you’re lucky) cut off the king’s head and take charge… and then what? As often as not, you end up with something as bad as before.

Political revolutions, says Hennacy, “only changed masters.” — “We made a revolution against England and are not free yet. The Russians made a revolution against the Czar and now have an even stronger dictatorship. It is not too late to make a revolution that will mean something — one that will stick: your own one-man revolution.”

Tyranny is not something that only infests the top of the org chart. The tyrant doesn’t cause tyranny, but is its most obvious symptom. Tyranny lives as tenaciously in the tyrannized as in the tyrant. This is why Thoreau was careful to say (emphasis mine):

“That government is best which governs not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Not, “when the workers seize power” or “when we get money out of politics” or anything of that sort, but “when men are prepared for it.” We must prepare ourselves, one one-man revolution at a time, and when we have, we will get the government we deserve (self-government, if Thoreau is right and if we ever do deserve such a thing).

The revolution is not accomplished when the last faction still standing wipes the blood from its hands and sits down behind the presidential desk to issue its first decree, but “when the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office” — that is, when tyranny is purged from the bottom of the org chart.

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. Thoreau mused in his journal:

If a man has spent all his days about some business by which he has merely got rich, as it is called, i.e., has got much money, many houses & barns & woodlots, then his life has been a failure, I think. But if he has been trying to better his condition in a higher sense than this — has been trying to be somebody, to invent something — i.e., to invent and get a patent for himself — so that all may see his originality, though he should never get above board — & all great inventors, you know, commonly die poor — I shall think him comparatively successful.

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 crush the confederacy of slavers, they were singing “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave — his soul is marching on!”

At the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, Brown was called insane by the pulpit, popular opinion, and the press (even — especially — the liberal, abolitionist press). Some gave as evidence for his insanity the most extraordinarily sane thing about him:

It is mentioned against him & 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’d think with the example of Jesus hovering over Western Civilization, 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 attributed to Tolstoy: “no sincere effort made in the behalf of Truth is ever lost.” You just need to remember that the seemingly small victories in an uncompromising one-man revolution can be more worthwhile (when seen from the perspective of what is worthwhile, not just what is expedient) than huge triumphs rotting within from compromise and half-truths.

Slavery in particular was such an unambiguous evil that it was one of “those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply,” Thoreau said. He made this comparison: if the only way you can save yourself from drowning is to unjustly wrest a plank away from another drowning man, 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 one-man 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.”

“Hennacy, do you think you can change the world?” said Bert Fireman, a columnist on the Phoenix Gazette.

“No, but I am damn sure it can’t change me” was my reply.

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 this last quote, Hennacy is paraphrasing 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.”)

One-in-a-million can move the world

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

Hennacy says the 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 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, and have not got this name rather by meddling with the exposed roots of innocent institutions than with their own.

We don’t progress by passively absorbing the inevitable bounty of history grinding away unconsciously on the masses, as the Hegelians might put 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 be heroic ourselves.

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 fulfilled more of the role of a Lenny Bruce; Hennacy’s wife suggested Don Quixote.) 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.

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.

Even if we fall short of this goal ourselves, by choosing this goal we not only choose the only goal worth choosing, 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. Most people are incapable of recognizing or comprehending the hero in real life — they lionize the dead martyred heroes of past generations, while joining the lynch mobs to martyr the heroes of their own.

It only takes a little leavening to leaven the loaf

By aiming at this standard, you also raise the standards of those around you, and so even if you cannot detect a direct influence, you improve society. The way Thoreau put it — “It is not so im­por­tant that many should be as good as you, as that there be some ab­so­lute good­ness some­where; for that will leaven the whole lump.”†

By being virtuous in an out-of-the-ordinary way you encourage people to call ordinary vices into question and you force the devil’s advocates to show themselves by coming to the devil’s defense. Thoreau was convinced that one person was enough to leaven the loaf:

[I]f one thou­sand, if one hun­dred, if ten men whom I could name, — if ten hon­est men only, — aye, if one hon­est man, in this State of Mas­sa­chu­setts, ceas­ing to hold slaves, were ac­tu­ally to with­draw from this co­part­ner­ship, and be locked up in the county jail there­for, it would be the ab­o­li­tion of slav­ery in Amer­ica.

Hennacy said that his “work was not that of an organizer but of a Sower to sow the seeds.”

We really can’t change the world. We really can’t change other people! The best we can do is to start a few thinking here and there. The way to do this, if we are sincere, is to change ourselves!

When they are ready for it [my emphasis again — ♇], the rich, the bourgeois intellectual, the bum, and even the politician and the clergy may have an awakening of conscience because of the uncompromising seeds of Christian Anarchism which we are sowing.

You have a plan to reform the world? As the saying goes: “show me, don’t tell me.” Thoreau:

The Reformer who comes recommending any institution or system to the adoption of men, must not rely solely on logic and argument, or on eloquence and oratory for his success, but see that he represents one pretty perfect institution in himself…

I ask of all Reformers, of all who are recommending Temperance, Justice, Charity, Peace, the Family, Community or Associative life, not to give us their theory and wisdom only, for these are no proof, but to carry around with them each a small specimen of his own manufactures, and to despair of ever recommending anything of which a small sample at least cannot be exhibited: — that the Temperance man let me know the savor of Temperance, if it be good, the Just man permit to enjoy the blessings of liberty while with him, the Community man allow me to taste the sweets of the Community life in his society.

Too many reformers think they can reform the rottenness of the system the people are sustaining without changing the rottenness of the people who sustain the system. “The disease and disorder in society are wont to be referred to the false relations in which men live one to another, but strictly speaking there can be no such thing as a false relation if the condition of the things related is true. False relations grow out of false conditions. … It is not the worst reason why the reform should be a private and individual enterprise, that perchance the evil may be private also.”

So often we hear of a Big Plan that, were it enacted as designed, would solve the Big Problems. But the problem with the big plans is that they never seem to get enacted, or if they do, they never seem to work as designed, as the same problems show up in new guises. Meanwhile the planners waste their time and energy and don’t change what is changeable. Tolstoy put it this way:

If a man drinks, and I tell him that he can himself stop drinking and must do so, there is some hope that he will pay attention to me; but if I tell him that his drunkenness forms a complex and difficult problem, which we, the learned, will try to solve in our meetings, all the probabilities are that he, waiting for the solution of the problem, will continue to drink. The same is true of the false and intricate scientific, external means for the cessation of war, like the international tribunals, the court of arbitration, and other similar foolish things, when we with them keep in abeyance the simplest and most essential means for the cessation of war, which is only too obvious to anybody. For people who do not need war not to fight we need no international tribunals, no solution of questions, but only that the people who are subject to deception should awaken and free themselves from that spell under which they are. This means for the abolition of war consists in this, that the men who do not need war, who consider a participation in war to be a sin, should stop fighting.

An alcoholic who spoke with Hennacy had much the same sentiment: “the AA fixed me up. You are right in not wanting to change the world by violence; the change has to come with each person first.”

The present American peace movement, stubbornly paying for the imperial armies it says it opposes, reminds me of drunks meeting in a tavern at happy hour to organize a prohibition movement that will solve their alcohol problem.

Your one-man revolution isn’t as lonely as it may seem

Hennacy and Thoreau also had faith that if you begin the one-man revolution, this will attract like-minded souls to you and you to them, and that you will find yourself working in concert with comrades you never knew you had:

Thoreau: “Men talk much of cooperation nowadays, of working together to some worthy end; but what little cooperation there is, is as if it were not, being a simple result of which the means are hidden, a harmony inaudible to men. If a man has faith, he will cooperate with equal faith everywhere. If he has not faith he will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to.”

Hennacy: “In reading Tolstoy I had gained the idea that if a person had the One Man Revolution in his heart and lived it, he would be led by God toward those others who felt likewise.… This was to be proven in a most dramatic way, and was to usher me into the second great influence of my life: that of the Catholic Worker movement.”

The One-Man Revolution

So what do you have to do to be the exemplar and sow the seeds?

  1. Accept responsibility, and act responsibly.
  2. Build yourself a glass house and start throwing stones.

Accept responsibility, and act responsibly

Most political action amounts to “who can we find to take responsibility for this problem” — the One Man Revolutionary asks “what can I do to take responsibility for this problem?”

Not that everything is your responsibility, or that the world is looking to you personally to solve all of its problems. But you should at the very least examine your life to see what problems or solutions you are contributing to with it. Can one person make a difference? You are already making a difference — what kind of difference are you making?

It is not a man’s duty, as a mat­ter of course, to de­vote him­self to the erad­i­cat­ion of any, even the most enor­mous wrong; he may still prop­erly have other con­cerns to en­gage him, but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it prac­ti­cally his sup­port. If I de­vote my­self to other pur­suits and con­tem­plat­ions, I must first see, at least, that I do not pur­sue them sit­ting upon an­other man’s shoul­ders. I must get off him first, that he may pur­sue his con­tem­plat­ions too.

A man has not ev­ery thing to do, but some­thing; and be­cause he can­not do ev­ery thing, it is not nec­es­sary that he should do some­thing wrong.

In Thoreau’s time, the evils of slavery and of wars of conquest were sustained by the active allegiance and support of the ordinary people around him, many of whom nonetheless congratulated themselves for their anti-war, anti-slavery opinions.

I quar­rel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-op­er­ate with, and do the bid­ding of those far away, and with­out whom the lat­ter would be harm­less.

I have heard some of my towns­men say, “I should like to have them or­der me out to help put down an in­sur­rec­tion of the slaves, or to march to Mex­ico, — see if I would go;” and yet these very men have each, di­rectly by their al­le­giance, and so in­di­rectly, at least, by their money, fur­nished a sub­sti­tute. The sol­dier is ap­plauded who re­fuses to serve in an un­just war by those who do not re­fuse to sus­tain the un­just gov­ern­ment which makes the war…

Those who, while they dis­ap­prove of the char­ac­ter and meas­ures of a gov­ern­ment, yield to it their al­le­giance and sup­port, are un­doubt­edly its most con­sci­en­tious sup­port­ers, and so fre­quently the most se­ri­ous ob­sta­cles to re­form. Some are pe­ti­tion­ing the State to dis­solve the Union, to dis­re­gard the req­ui­si­tions of the Pres­i­dent. Why do they not dis­solve it them­selves, — the union be­tween them­selves and the State, — and re­fuse to pay their quota into its trea­sury?

If a thou­sand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a vi­o­lent and bloody meas­ure, as it would be to pay them, and en­able the State to com­mit vi­o­lence and shed in­no­cent blood. This is, in fact, the def­i­ni­tion of a peace­able rev­o­lu­tion, if any such is pos­si­ble.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that because the one-man revolution is in your heart that it can just stay there, locked up inside, without leaking out into the world around you.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course. Do not let your right hand know what your left hand does in that line of business. I have no doubt it will prove a failure.

The one-man revolution doesn’t necessarily require living in opposition to society and the status quo, but it does require holding fast to justice and virtue. When society and the status quo are opposed to justice and virtue, as they so often are, this puts them in opposition to you as well.

Build yourself a glass house and start throwing stones

Your friends and even your enemies will come to your aid when you try to hold yourself to a high standard. All you have to do is to make yourself vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. People love to point out hypocritical moralists, in part because some hypocritical moralists are hilarious, but also in part because it helps people excuse their own failures to hold themselves to high standards. If you build yourself a glass house and throw stones from it, everyone will volunteer to keep you on the straight-and-narrow.

Hennacy:

I have… put myself in a glass house. If so I must needs take whatever stones come my way. I have the right by my life of integrity to criticize, but I must also take whatever criticism comes my way in all good humor.

[A] spoiled and arrogant priest wanted to know if I was “holier than thou.” I told him I hoped by Christ I was, for if I wasn’t I would be in a hell of a fix. I used this blunt method to deflate his spurious piety.

At times those who do not want to have their inconsistencies pointed out say in a super-sweet voice to me “judge not, lest ye be judged.” I reply, “O.K., judge me, then.”

When your standards for yourself rise, so do your standards for other people (otherwise you really are being arrogant). Thoreau, criticized for demanding too much from people, said he could not “con­vince my­self that I have any right to be sat­is­fied with men as they are, and to treat them ac­cord­ingly, and not ac­cord­ing, in some re­spects, to my req­ui­si­tions and ex­pec­ta­tions of what they and I ought to be.”

While both Thoreau and Hennacy strike me as stern with others, and maybe not always fun to be around (as Hennacy would say: “I love my enemies but am hell on my friends”), they were anything but joyless. Thoreau’s vigorous, enthusiastic love of life and the world are legendary, and Hennacy’s character too was eager, life-affirming, and generous (even in its criticisms).

Utah Phillips came home from the Korean war a drunken brawler, checked in to Hennacy’s Catholic Worker hospitality house in Salt Lake City, and eight years later checked out again, sober, a pacifist, and an anarchist. He remembered Hennacy this way:

He was tough without being hard — tough without that brittle hardness that some tough men have that would shatter if you struck it too hard. “Love in Action,” Dorothy Day called him — Dostoyevsky’s words: “Love in action is harsh and dreadful compared to love in dreams.”‡

Neither Thoreau nor Hennacy had any tolerance for bliss-bunnyishness, but both were cheerful; both knew how to be dutiful without being dour. Thoreau:

To march sturdily through life, patiently and resolutely looking grim defiance at one’s foes, that is one way; but we cannot help being more attracted by that kind of heroism which relaxes its brows in the presence of danger, and does not need to maintain itself strictly, but, by a kind of sympathy with the universe, generously adorns the scene and the occasion, and loves valor so well that itself would be the defeated party only to behold it; which is as serene and as well pleased with the issue as the heavens which look down upon the field of battle. It is but a lower height of heroism when the hero wears a sour face.

A great cheerfulness indeed have all great wits and heroes possessed, almost a profane levity to such as understood them not, but their religion had the broader basis of health and permanence. For the hero, too, has his religion, though it is the very opposite to that of the ascetic. It demands not a narrower cell but a wider world.

In conclusion

I’ve tried here to put forward the strongest affirmative case for the practical effectiveness of the one-man revolution, at least as it can be found in Hennacy’s and Thoreau’s writings.

They make a strong and persuasive argument, I think, but not an airtight one. I wish more evidence was preserved of them in dialog with incisive critics of the one-man revolution, to hear how they would respond to the best arguments against it.

But what keeps the argument for a one-man revolution from persuading people is not, I think, the strength of the counter-arguments, but just the fact that to accept the argument is not enough — it demands much more than a “Like,” and much more than most people think they have to give. To be persuaded is to be overwhelmed, to take the first step off the path and into uncharted territory, and only a few of us have the courage to take that step.

Here are some additional quotes that I cut from earlier drafts of my “one-man revolution” post, but that you might find interesting or inspiring if you enjoyed the quotes that did make the cut:

Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czars is but a petty state… And, O ye Reformers! if the good Gods have given ye any high ray of truth to be wrought into life, here in your own realms without let or hindrance is the application to be made.

―Thoreau

If organizing thousands of people into a group promising to do good, or pledging themselves to revolutionary action is practical, then I am not practical… I did not need a committee to coordinate or regulate me, for I can organize myself. This is what a one-man revolution is supposed to do.

―Hennacy

I told my young friend that he could always get a crowd to applaud mild criticism of war and for the lowering of taxes and raising of wages, but that this same crowd would really follow the blazing torch of super demagogues… Yes, men by themselves are not so bad, but in a crowd or in a political campaign where they wear “labels” they are only suckers. I pointed out that spiritual power was the greatest force in the world, and that beside it all the two-penny political victories did not mean a thing. Too many of us dissipate our energy by being “for all good causes,” attending meetings and passing resolutions, organizing and presenting petitions — all this effort to change others, when if we really got down to it we could use this energy to change ourselves. This can be done by spiritual means and it does not wear one out but is invigorating. We become tired radicals because we use our weakest weapon: the ballot box, where we are always outnumbered, and refuse to use our strongest weapon: spiritual power.

―Hennacy

I admit at the start that myself and those like me are not going to win, for the whole trend is toward the welfare state and bigger and better churches. The trend is not toward individual responsibility and the voluntary poverty and simple life of the early Christians — all the more reason we should keep on trying, though.

―Hennacy

[W]hen you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up.

―Thoreau

What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend my­self to the wrong which I condemn.

―Thoreau

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

Ethics for the New Millennium, by the Dalai Lama

I reviewed the Dalai Lama’s book Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World (). I enjoyed that book and found it very thought-provoking.

I admit I was a little surprised — I think I had associated the Dalai Lama with some of his more foggy-headed, romantic, guru-seeking fans here in California and so I approached his book with preconceptions of it being likely to be a bunch of gauzy platitudes dressed up with Buddhist nomenclature and foisted off as profundity. Instead, the book was largely methodical and precise, and also refreshingly practical in a way that many modern books on ethics are not.

I recently read his earlier book, Ethics for the New Millennium (), and, alas, it was more along the lines of what I had been afraid Beyond Religion was going to be. Still, there was some meat on the bone worth chewing on.

The key to Ethics for the New Millennium is the Dalai Lama’s assertion that the way to be happy and content is to develop and expand one’s own compassion. The purest and most universally-directed altruism is simultaneously the most enlightened self-interest. Similarly, the key to solving the variety of the world’s problems is for the people directly involved in the problems and their solutions to develop and nurture compassion in themselves — if they do this, the solutions will come of themselves; if they fail to attend to this, then no programs they come up with, however clever, will do the trick.

Because, according to the Dalai Lama, the happiness/suffering continuum is the primary (or even only) human motivator — as people come to understand that their happiness depends on compassion and on the happiness of others, a sort of virtuous cycle will lift all of us up into more rewarding lives.

To me, all of this is suspiciously nice-sounding, as in “wouldn’t it be nice if that were true.” But do we have any reason to believe that it is true, or are we just inclined to believe it because it sounds comforting?

For example, is it really accurate to say that people are motivated by a one-dimensional happiness/suffering continuum? Might it not really be the case that human motivations are multi-dimensional, and that these motivations might be pulling us in different directions at once — some towards less suffering and more happiness, and some just the opposite? People are driven by status and shame, eroticism and disgust, fear and pride, and so many other things besides, and at least some of these seem to map only awkwardly to the happiness/suffering continuum.

And is it really true that by cultivating compassion and empathy and exhibiting altruistic behavior that we inevitably become happier and more content? This may sound cynical, but I think there may be a confusion of cause and effect here. I know that when I am being compassionate, empathetic, and altruistic I am also usually happy and content — but might it be that when my own needs are met, when my life overflows with abundance, when I have few worries and cares, then I am most able to concentrate on other people’s needs and take the time to attend to them? It may be that my happiness and contentment and my compassion and altruism stem from a common precondition of being carefree and satisfied.

(When I put on my amateur sociobiologist’s pith helmet, I get even more cynical about this: conspicuously altruistic acts are a great way of demonstrating fitness to potential mates. They’re kind of like feathers in a peacock’s tail: “Look at how much surplus I have in my life, that I can spend so much time, energy, and/or money on the lives of other people! I must be a mighty successful fellow!”)

One thing I thought was interesting was the Dalai Lama’s suggestion that people use something akin to creative visualization to develop compassion. In a similar way to the way athletes will imagine themselves succeeding in particular athletic feats, and this act of vivid imagination will help to train their minds and bodies to cooperate in actually accomplishing these feats, the Dalai Lama suggests that we can improve our compassion by “sustained reflection on, and familiarization with compassion, through rehearsal and practice”.

Whereas Hannah Arendt centered ethics in thinking, and critics of Arendt like Arne Johan Vetlesen suggested that the emotion of empathy is the key, the Dalai Lama tries to find a middle ground with nying je, which grows out of empathy but also has an intellectual component:

Now while generally translated simply as “compassion,” the term nying je has a wealth of meaning that is difficult to convey succinctly… It connotes love, affection, kindness, gentleness, generosity of spirit, and warm-heartedness… [I]t does not imply “pity” as the word compassion may. There is no sense of condescension. On the contrary, nying je denotes a feeling of connection with others, reflecting its origins in empathy.…

…[It] is understood as an emotion, [but] it belongs to that category of emotions which have a more developed cognitive component. Some emotions, such as the revulsion we tend to feel at the sight of blood, are basically instinctual. Others, such as fear of poverty, have this more developed cognitive component. We can thus understand nying je in terms of a combination of empathy and reason. We can think of empathy as the characteristic of a very honest person; reason as that of someone who is very practical. When the two are put together, the combination is highly effective.

The process of developing nying je and of disciplining those emotions and tendencies that interfere with it, is a life-long one:

This is no easy task, and those who are religiously minded must understand that there is no blessing or initiation — which, if only we could receive it — or any mysterious or magical formula or mantra or ritual — if only we could discover it — that can enable us to achieve transformation instantly. It comes little by little, just as a building is constructed brick by brick or, as the Tibetan expression has it, an ocean is formed drop by drop. Also, because, unlike our bodies which soon get sick, old, and worn out, the afflictive [harm-provoking] emotions never age, it is important to realize that dealing with them is a lifelong struggle. Nor should the reader suppose that what we are talking about here is the mere acquisition of knowledge. It is not even a question of developing the conviction that may come from such knowledge. What we are talking about is gaining an experience of virtue through constant practice and familiarization so that it becomes spontaneous. What we find is that the more we develop concern for others’ well-being, the easier it becomes to act in others’ interests. As we become habituated to the effort required, so the struggle to sustain it lessens. Eventually, it will become second nature. But there are no shortcuts.