Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → comparisons with the abolitionist movement

If I’m taking the lazy blogger’s path lately — turning The Picket Line into a barely-annotated linkfarm — I’ll put the blame on Adam Hochschild, who wrote the book Bury the Chains that I got as a Christmas gift.

Here’s the quick version of why this book is capturing my attention:

[P]icture the world as it existed in 1787. 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, from the ancestors of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to the family of the fabulously wealthy William Beckford, lord mayor of London, who hired Mozart to give his son piano lessons. 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 1787, to change all of this, nine out of ten people would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The 10^th 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 19^th century, slavery was, at least on paper, outlawed almost everywhere.

It’s more gripping than a “who dunnit,” and I’m eager to get to the “how they dunnit?” Chances are I’ll report on some of what Hochschild found out, so stay tuned.

Last weekend I finished Adam Hochschild’s book about the British abolitionist movement — Bury the Chains.

It’s a fascinating story, which I won’t try to summarize since Hochschild himself distilled his book into an article for Mother Jones which is available on-line.

A few things that stood out to me were the sophistication of the public relations, lobbying and activist techniques both of the anti-slavery activists and of the slavery industry. In many respects, the way the abolitionist struggle was fought and fought against seemed as though it could be happening today with few changes.

Here’s a modern-day apologist for torture, in the latest edition of City Journal:

So what were these cruel and degrading practices? For one, providing a detainee an incentive for cooperation — such as a cigarette or, especially favored in Cuba, a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich or a Twinkie unless specifically approved by the secretary of defense. In other words, if an interrogator had learned that Usama bin Ladin’s accountant loved Cadbury chocolate, and intended to enter the interrogation booth armed with a Dairy Milk Wafer to extract the name of a Saudi financier, he needed to “specifically determine that military necessity requires” the use of the Dairy Milk Wafer and send an alert to Secretary Rumsfeld that chocolate was to be deployed against an al-Qaida operative.

It’s worth noting that people just as shameless said things just as stupid about slavery back in the day:

Answering questions about conditions on the slave ships, one pro-slavery witness at the hearings swore that slaves were so relieved at escaping Africa’s barbarism that “Nine out of Ten rejoice at falling into our Hands.” Lord Rodney, a famous admiral, declared that he had never seen a Negro flogged half as severely as an English schoolboy. James Penny, a former captain, made the slaves on the Atlantic crossing sound almost like cruise passengers: “If the Weather is sultry, and there appears the least Perspiration upon their Skins, when they come upon Deck, there are Two Men attending with Cloths to rub them perfectly dry, and another to give them a little Cordial.… They are then supplied with Pipes and Tobacco … they are amused with Instruments of Music peculiar to their own country … and when tired of Music and Dancing, they then go to Games of Chance.”

It all sounds so familiar, somehow. Astroturfing? Capitalizing on anti-French sentiment? The pro-slavers did it. In-your-face guerrilla theater? Abolitionists had it in their bag of tricks:

To show what slave families endured, [Benjamin] Lay once stood outside an American Quaker meetinghouse with one leg bared, deep in snow; another time, it is said, he kidnapped a slave owner’s child for a few hours. He publicly smashed teacups in which slave-grown sugar was consumed.

I was most interested in the sugar boycott, which was the tactic that most reminded me of tax resistance. In short: cane sugar from the Caribbean was what drove the British slave trade and made it profitable. The harvesting of cane and its processing into sugar by slaves was also extremely brutal, relative even to the already inhuman institution of slavery itself.

Eventually, abolitionists came to notice that the profits from the sugar in their teacup and the rum in their barrel were what kept the slave trade in business.

[H]undreds of thousands of people had stopped using sugar. Ignited by several pamphlets, one of which sold an estimated seventy thousand copies in four months, the sugar boycott burst into life in response to Parliament’s 1791 rejection of the abolition bill. For some the boycott meant self-denial; those with an incurable sweet tooth instead ate sugar from India. As with so much else, Quakers were in the vanguard: an eighteen-year-old named William Allen had already stopped eating sugar two years earlier.

[William] Wilberforce, wary of anything that smacked of stirring up popular feeling, thought the time was not right for a boycott. Careful to avoid offending him, for several years the abolition committee took no stand. But [Thomas] Clarkson spurred on the boycotters, delighted to find a “remedy, which the people were … taking into their own hands.… There was no town, through which I passed, in which there was not some one individual who had left off the use of sugar. In the smaller towns there were from ten to fifty … and in the larger from two to five hundred.… They were of all ranks and parties. Rich and poor, churchmen and dissenters.… Even grocers had left off trading in the article.… By the best computation I was able to make from notes taken down in my journey, no fewer than three hundred thousand persons had abandoned the use of sugar.”

…In several parts of the country, grocers reported sugar sales dropping by a third to a half in a few months’ time. Over a two-year period, the sale of sugar from India increased more than ten-fold.… Advertisements resembled the “fair trade” food labeling of today: “BENJAMIN TRAVERS, Sugar-Refiner, acquaints the Publick that he has now an assortment of Loaves, Lumps, Powder Sugar, and Syrup, ready for sale … produced by the labour of FREEMEN.”

Then, as now, the full workings of a globalized economy were invisible, and the boycott caught people’s imagination because it brought those hidden ties to light, laying bare the dramatic, direct connection between British daily life and that of slaves. The poet Southey spoke of tea as “the blood-sweetened beverage,”… William Cowper wrote:

I own I am shock’d at the purchase of slaves,
And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;
What I hear of their hardships, their tortures, and groans,
Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.

I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
Especially sugar, so needful we see,
What? give up our desserts, our coffee and tea!

Like many such actions today, the sugar boycott was partly symbolic. Systematically giving up all slave-grown products would have required Britons to also stop using tobacco, coffee, and cotton clothing (much of it woven in the mills of staunchly antislavery Manchester). Nonetheless, a boycott of sugar was potentially a powerful weapon because the country consumed so much of it. In the eighteenth century, sugar was Britain’s largest import.… ¶ Everyone could understand the logic of the sugar boycott, even children.…

Quietly but subversively, the boycott added a new dimension to British political life. At a time when only a small fraction of the population could vote, citizens took upon themselves the power to act when Parliament had not. “The legislature having refused to interpose, the people are now necessarily called on,” wrote one boycotter. The boycott was radical in yet another way, made explicit in at least one pamphlet: it struck not just at the slave trade but at slavery itself. And, finally, the boycott was largely put into effect by those who bought and cooked the family food: women.

This is important, among other reasons, because although the abolitionist movement in Britain was founded and given its initial energy largely by men, it was groups of abolitionist women who later radicalized the movement at a crucial time. After the sugar boycott was disrupted by slave revolts in the Carribean (which had a greater effect on the price of sugar, and did more to make slavery untenable, than abolitionist boycott efforts did), and after the abolitionist movement suffered from a general British crackdown on activism and organizing in response to labor unrest and the French Revolution, it was abolitionist women who lit a fire under the movement and got things going again:

The strongest such voices were those of women, and foremost among them was Elizabeth Heyrick, a former schoolteacher and convert to Quakerism. In 1824 she published a widely read pamphlet called Immediate, not Gradual Abolition. A blast of fresh air, Heyrick, unlike virtually every other writer on the subject, roundly criticized the mainstream antislavery figures for their “slow, cautious, accommodating measures.”…

Heyrick began campaigning among the people of Leicester to promote a new sugar boycott, visiting all of the city’s grocers to urge them to stock no slave-grown goods. Her message was clear and bracing: “The West Indian planter and the people of this country, stand in the same moral relation to each other, as the thief and the receiver of stolen goods.… Why petition Parliament at all, to do that for us, which … we can do more speedily and more effectually for ourselves?” As in the 1790s, the boycott was an inherently radicalizing tactic, because its effectiveness depended on everyone’s participating; men and women, rich and poor. Heyrick hoped that the poor, in particular, would rally to the cause, because they “have themselves tasted of the cup of adversity.” Inspired by her, women’s societies put out boycott pamphlets and began compiling a national list of everyone who pledged to abstain from West Indian sugar.

You’d have to read the previous three-hundred-and-some pages of Hochschild’s book to really see how radical Heyrick’s message was. The equation of using slave-produced merchandise with receiving stolen property, the calling on people to ignore Parliament and take things into their own hands — nothing like this comes up in the plaintive attempts at prodding legislators and documenting the evils of the slave trade by the earlier generation of abolitionists.

While the older groups worked diplomatically to try to persuade legislators to gradually end slavery, the newer radical groups were having none of it:

The women’s societies were almost always bolder than those of the men. Women in Worcester not only stopped buying slave-grown sugar; they refused to patronize bakers who used it and shopkeepers who sold it. This was the first time on record that the sugar boycott had been used this way, making it a sharper political tool and less a matter of virtuous personal sacrifice. The Birmingham women declared that they would give their annual £50 donation to the national antislavery society only “when they are willing to give up the word ‘gradual’ in their title.”

Unanswered by Hochschild is the question of what practical effect the boycott had on the slave trade (certainly it had some, but it’s hard to say how much and whether its impact was swamped by other happenstance swings in the sugar economy caused by wars, slave rebellions, and the like). He is more able to gauge, and puts more emphasis on, the impact the boycott movement had on bringing together abolitionists in common cause, and in strengthening the idea of popular protest and of political action by people denied power in the political establishment.

As I said, the sugar boycott was a part of the story that I was very interested in, but it’s really just a small part of a book that has much more to say and says it well.

In Paris and the Social Revolution (1905), Alvan Francis Sanborn briefly surveyed the history of conscientious tax resistance that preceded Tolstoy’s interest in the subject, from Thoreau through William Lloyd Garrison’s non-resistants, to more recent resisters:

There’s a chapter devoted to Tolstoy in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

When that great and original child of nature, Thoreau, the Hermit of Walden, protested against the collection of taxes in Concord town, he little suspected, probably, that he was prefiguring a revolutionary movement which, before the century was over, was to alarm the sleek and the smug of the Old World and the New; and yet, whether Thoreau realised it or not, his attitude was the anarchistic attitude and his act an act of the propagande par l’example.

The attitude of the American anti-slavery champion, William Lloyd Garrison, was also essentially anarchistic.

“Garrison,” says Tolstoy, “as a man enlightened by Christianity, starting out with a practical aim, — the struggle against slavery, — understood very soon that the cause of slavery was not a casual, temporary seizure of several millions of negroes by the Southerners, but an old and universal anti-Christian recognition of the right of violence of some people over others. The means towards the recognition of this right was always the evil, which people considered possible to outroot or to lessen by rude force; that is, again by evil. And, realising this, Garrison pointed out against slavery, not the sufferings of the slaves, not the cruelty of the slave-owners, not the equal rights of citizens, but the eternal Christian law of non-resistance. Garrison understood that which the most forward champions against slavery failed to understand, — that the sole irresistible means against slavery was the denial of the right of one man over the liberty of another under any circumstances whatever.

“The Abolitionists attempted to prove that slavery was illegal, unprofitable, cruel, degrading, and so forth; but the pro-slavery champions, in their turn, proved the untimeliness, the danger, and the harmful consequences which would arise from the abolition of slavery. And neither could convince the other. But Garrison, understanding that the slavery of the negroes was but a private case of general violence, put forth the general principle with which it was impossible to disagree, — that no one, under any pretext, has the right of ruling; that is, of using force over his equals. Garrison did not insist so much on the right of slaves to be free as he denied the right of any man whatever, or of any company of men, to compel another man to do anything by force. For the battle with slavery he put forth the principle of the battle with all the evil of the world.”

In an earlier Picket Line entry I wrote about how Garrison and his New England Non-Resistance Society grappled with the tax resistance issue. I’ve since found another Garrison quote (from his magazine The Liberator):

It is argued, that “if voting under the Constitution be a criminal participation in slavery, the paying of taxes under it is equally so.” Without stopping to show that there is a fallacy in this argument, we reply, that, in the common use and understanding of the terms, no seceder will ever again pay taxes to the Government while it upholds slavery. He may consent peaceably to yield up what is demanded of him, but not without remonstrance, and only as he would give up his purse to a highwayman. He will not recognize it as a lawful tax — he will not pay it as a tax — but will denounce it as robbery and oppression.

Sanborn continues:

The refusal of the citizens of the little French commune of Counozouls to pay their taxes between 1902 and 1904 because they were deprived of their hereditary right to supply themselves with wood from an adjacent forest, and the “passive resistance” of the nonconformists in England to the enforcement of the new education act, and of the French Catholics to the expulsion of the monastic orders, are recent instances of probably unconscious propagande par l’example.

Tolstoy has made a clear and full statement for the purport of the propagande par l’example.

“Taxes,” he says, “were never instituted by common consent,… but are taken by those who have the power of taking them.… A man should not voluntarily pay taxes to governments either directly or indirectly; nor should he accept money collected by taxes either as salary or as pension or as a reward; nor should he make use of governmental institutions supported by taxes, since they are collected by violence from the people.”

He holds military service in similar abhorrence:—

“Every honest man ought to understand that the payment of taxes which are employed to maintain and arm soldiers, and, still more, serving in the army, are not indifferent acts, but wicked and shameful acts, since he who commits them not only permits assassination, but participates in it.”

Tolstoy returned often to the subject of tax resistance, both as a tactic and as a principle. He was influenced by Étienne de la Boétie’s The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude and believed that the trick to ending evil and oppression was to fully stop participating in it, rather than to resist it forcefully. Refusing to voluntarily pay taxes was one way of doing this. At the same time, he saw taxation as itself an example of theft and violence and injustice.

He wrote a series of sketches called “The Wisdom of Children” in which he tried to demonstrate that a naïve, child-like view of social arrangements often held more truth than the more sophisticated points of view we learn as we become adults. One of these sketches dealt with taxation:

Bailiff. (entering a poor cottage. Nobody is in except Grushka, a little girl of seven. He looks around him.) Nobody at home?

Grushka. Mother has gone to bring home the cow, and Fedka is at work in the master’s yard.

Bailiff. Well, tell your mother the bailiff called. Tell her I am giving her notice for the third time, and that she must pay her taxes before Sunday without fail, or else I will take her cow.

Grushka. The cow? Are you a thief? We will not let you take our cow.

Bailiff. (smiling.) What a smart girl, I say! What is your name?

Grushka. Grushka.

Bailiff. You are a good girl, Grushka. Now listen. Tell you mother that, although I am not a thief, I will take her cow.

Grushka. Why will you take our cow if you are not a thief?

Bailiff. Because what is due must be paid. I shall take the cow for the taxes that are not paid.

Grushka. What’s that: taxes?

Bailiff. What a nuisance of a girl! What are taxes? They are money paid by the people by the order of the Tsar.

Grushka. To whom?

Bailiff. The Tsar will look after that when the money comes in.

Grushka. He’s not poor, is he? We are the poor people. The Tsar is rich. Why does he want us to give him money?

Bailiff. He does not take it for himself. He spends it on us, fools that we are. It all goes to supply our needs — to pay the authorities, the army, the schools. It is for our own good that we pay taxes.

Grushka. How does it benefit us if our cow is taken away? There’s no good in that.

Bailiff. You will understand that when you are grown-up. Now, mind you give your mother my message.

Grushka. I will not repeat all your nonsense to her. You can do whatever you and the Tsar want. And we shall mind our own business.

Bailiff. What a devil of a girl she will be when she grows up!

More directly, Tolstoy wrote:

I remember the utterance of a Russian peasant, who was religious and, therefore, truly liberal. Like Thoreau, he did not consider it just to pay taxes for things which his conscience did not approve of, and when he was asked to pay his share of the taxes, he asked what the taxes which he would pay would be used for, saying, “If the taxes shall be used for a good thing, I will at once give you not only what you demand, but even more; but if they shall be used for something bad, I cannot and will not give a kopek of my own free will.”

Of course, they lost no time with him, but broke down his closed gate, carried off his cow, and sold it for the taxes. Thus in reality there is but one true and real cause of taxes, — the power which collects them, — the possibility of robbing those who do not give the taxes willingly, and even of beating them for a refusal, of putting them in prison, and of punishing them — as is actually done.

In “The Kingdom of God is Within You” — a text that proved very influential to later Christian anarchists, pacifists, and to Gandhi — Tolstoy explicitly advocated tax resistance, and imagined the state to be essentially helpless before conscientious tax resisters:

What importance, one might think, can one attach to such an incident as some dozens of crazy fellows, as people will call them, refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the government, refusing to pay taxes, to take part in law proceedings or in military service.

These people are punished and exiled to a distance, and life goes on in its old way. One might think there was no importance in such incidents; but yet it is just those incidents, more than anything else, that will undermine the power of the state and prepare the way for the freedom of men. These are the individual bees, who are beginning to separate from the swarm, and are flying near it, waiting till the whole swarm can no longer be prevented from starting off after them. And the governments know this, and fear such incidents more than all the Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists, and their plots and dynamite bombs.

The subjects of a state are all bound to pay taxes. And every one pays taxes, till suddenly one man in Kharkov, another in Tver and a third in Samara, refuse to pay taxes — all, as though in collusion, saying the same thing. One says he will only pay when they tell him what object the money taken from him will be spent on. “If it is for good deeds,” he says, “he will give it of his own accord, and more even than is required of him. If for evil deeds, then he will give nothing voluntarily, because by the law of Christ, whose follower he is, he cannot take part in evil deeds.” The others, too, say the same in other words, and will not voluntarily pay the taxes.

Those who have anything to be taken have their property taken from them by force; as for those who have nothing, they are left alone.

“What! didn’t you pay the tax?”

“No, I didn’t pay it.”

“And what happened—nothing?”

“Nothing.”

Tolstoy defended his views, including his attitudes toward taxation, as those demanded of people who would be followers of Jesus. So he was of course asked to explain his understanding of Jesus’s “Render unto Caesar” koan. He responded this way:

In reply to the question as to whether [Jesus] shall give the established tax upon entering Capernaum, He says distinctly that the sons, that is, His disciples, are free from every tax and are not obliged to pay it, and only not to tempt the collectors of the taxes, not to provoke them to commit the sin of violence, He orders His disciples to give that stater, which is accidentally found in the fish, and which does not belong to any one and is not taken from any one.

But in reply to the cunning question as to whether the tribute is to be paid to Cæsar, He says, “To Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s and to God the things which are God’s,” that is, give to Cæsar what belongs to him and is made by him, — the coin, — and to God give what is made by God and is implanted in you, — your soul, your conscience; give this to no one but God, and so do not do for Cæsar what is forbidden by God. And this answer surprises all by its boldness — and at the same time by its unanswerableness.

[Tolstoy’s footnote: “Not only the complete misunderstanding of Christ’s teaching, but also a complete unwillingness to understand it could have admitted that striking misinterpretation, according to which the words, ‘To Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s,’ signify the necessity of obeying Cæsar. In the first place, there is no mention there of obedience; in the second place, if Christ recognized the obligatoriness of paying tribute, and so of obedience, He would have said directly, ‘Yes, it should be paid;’ but He says, ‘Give to Cæsar what is his, that is, the money, and give your life to God,’ and with these latter words He not only does not encourage any obedience to power, but, on the contrary, points out that in everything which belongs to God it is not right to obey Cæsar.”]

When Christ is brought before Pilate, as a mutineer who has been perverting the nation and forbidding to give tribute to Cæsar (Luke ⅹⅹⅲ. 2), He, after saying what He found necessary to say, surprises and provokes all the chiefs with this, that He pays no attention to all their questions, and makes no reply to any of their questions.

For this arrangement of the power and disobedience to it, Christ is sentenced and crucified.

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.

My investigation of the “one-man revolution” a while back has been picking up some attention here and there on the net. Unfortunately, these days a lot of this buzz is coming from various social media discussion fora that don’t give me a working referrer link I can use to eavesdrop on how the conversation is going.

But the article also started some back-and-forth at the wtr-s email list. In the conclusion to my Picket Line post, I’d regretted that there wasn’t much evidence of either Thoreau or Hennacy having to defend their enthusiastic case for the “one-man revolution” against an incisive critic. The wtr-s discussion fills in some of this gap.

Larry Rosenwald, who has been a strong advocate for more-strongly coordinated and organized action in the American war tax resistance community, put in his two cents, making a couple of good points:

1. There are some good examples of real, positive change taking place through organized, collective effort, where it is hard to imagine a one-man revolution strategy having similar effects — for example, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Montgomery Improvement Association that kept it going; or the abolitionist movement.
2. The assertion that “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,” is too strong. Sometimes even an ordinary political revolution promises to be worth the trouble, and it would be a mistake to wait for a perhaps more-perfect but also less likely “enduring radical change.”

Larry also echoed Pam Allee’s point that the one-man revolution and the organized political revolution don’t have to be antagonists: “a ‘both-and’ approach to solutions is preferable to an ‘either-or.’ ”

I think there’s a lot of truth in these points.

Thoreau, with his one-man revolution, turned out to be very influential, and I think it cannot be denied that through his essay on civil disobedience he has had an enormous effect on the world. But I think Gandhi was being ridiculous when he credited Thoreau for ending slavery in America.

It is difficult to know how much credit to give to one-man revolutionaries. The nature of how they do business rarely leads to dramatic large-scale victories of the handshakes-and-peace-treaties sort. Their influence is more subtle and less acute.

It is hard to imagine the success of abolitionism in the British Empire without the well-organized, persistent, patient, flexible abolitionist movement there. But on the other hand, it is hard to imagine the success of abolitionism in the American Quaker church without one-man revolutionaries like Benjamin Lay standing barefoot in the snow outside of the meeting house to dramatize the suffering of slaves still held by Quakers. But maybe this says more about my imagination than about the relative strengths of the tactics.

Some other criticisms of the one-man revolution that occurred to me:

• If being organized and coordinated is such a tactical drawback, how come the people who are organized and coordinated to do wickedness seem to be so successful? (My guess is that Hennacy/Thoreau would respond that it’s difficult to do good as an organized collective, but not so difficult to do evil that way. Doing good means hitting the bullseye; doing evil you can just land the arrow anywhere. If you’re aiming a bow by committee, you’re unlikely to hit your target, but if you’re aiming for evil, you might not care so much in what direction you miss or how much.)
• The one-man revolution can degenerate into a fakir-ish narcissism, concentrating on ever-finer gradations of self-perfection that have diminishing practical returns. I’ve covered a few cases here at The Picket Line of people who have gone on ethical perfectionism binges that seem to have ended up doing more harm than good — for instance the self-immolation of Jeff Knaebel or the catastrophic renunciation of the Boekes.

And I’m sure this doesn’t exhaust the list.

My sympathies lie more with the one-man revolutionary camp, but I’m not a very good organizer, so I wonder if I am being biased by my own frustrations in trying to use organizing and coordinated action, and not by actual inherent flaws in the tactic.