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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- Accept responsibility, and act responsibly.
- 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.
