The Kingdom of God is within you by Leo Tolstoy

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Hypocrisy, which had formerly only a religious basis in the
doctrine of original sin, the redemption, and the Church, has in
our day gained a new scientific basis and has consequently caught
in its nets all those who had reached too high a stage of
development to be able to find support in religious hypocrisy. So
that while in former days a man who professed the religion of the
Church could take part in all the crimes of the state, and profit
by them, and still regard himself as free from any taint of sin,
so long as he fulfilled the external observances of his creed,
nowadays all who do not believe in the Christianity of the Church,
find similar well-founded irrefutable reasons in science for
regarding themselves as blameless and even highly moral in spite
of their participation in the misdeeds of government and the
advantages they gain from them.

A rich landowner--not only in Russia, but in France, England,
Germany, or America--lives on the rents exacted; from the people
living on his land, and robs these generally poverty-stricken
people of all he can get from them. This man's right of property
in the land rests on the fact that at every effort on the part of
the oppressed people, without his consent, to make use of the land
he considers his, troops are called out to subject them to
punishment and murder. One would have thought that it was obvious
that a man living in this way was an evil, egoistic creature and
could not possibly consider himself a Christian or a liberal. One
would have supposed it evident that the first thing such a man
must do, if he wishes to approximate to Christianity or
liberalism, would be to cease to plunder and ruin men by means of
acts of state violence in support of his claim to the land. And
so it would be if it were not for the logic of hypocrisy, which
reasons that from a religious point of view possession or non-
possession of land is of no consequence for salvation, and from
the scientific point of view, giving up the ownership of land is a
useless individual renunciation, and that the welfare of mankind
is not promoted in that way, but by a gradual modification of
external forms. And so we see this man, without the least trouble
of mind or doubt that people will believe in his sincerity,
organizing an agricultural exhibition, or a temperance society, or
sending some soup and stockings by his wife or children to three
old women, and boldly in his family, in drawing rooms, in
committees, and in the press, advocating the Gospel or
humanitarian doctrine of love for one's neighbor in general and
the agricultural laboring population in particular whom he is
continually exploiting and oppressing. And other people who are
in the same position as he believe him, commend him, and solemnly
discuss with him measures for ameliorating the condition of the
working-class, on whose exploitation their whole life rests,
devising all kinds of possible methods for this, except the one
without which all improvement of their condition is impossible,
i. e., refraining from taking from them the land necessary for
their subsistence. (A striking example of this hypocrisy was the
solicitude displayed by the Russian landowners last year, their
efforts to combat the famine which they had caused, and by which
they profited, selling not only bread at the highest price, but
even potato haulm at five rubles the dessiatine (about 2 and four-
fifths acres) for fuel to the freezing peasants.)

Or take a merchant whose whole trade--like all trade indeed--is
founded on a series of trickery, by means of which, profiting by
the ignorance or need of others, he buys goods below their value
and sells them again above their value. One would have fancied it
obvious that a man whose whole occupation was based on what in his
own language is called swindling, if it is done under other
conditions, ought to be ashamed of his position, and could not any
way, while he continues a merchant, profess himself a Christian or
a liberal.

But the sophistry of hypocrisy reasons that the merchant can pass
for a virtuous man without giving up his pernicious course of
action; a religious man need only have faith and a liberal man
need only promote the modification of external conditions--the
progress of industry. And so we see the merchant (who often goes
further and commits acts of direct dishonesty, selling adulterated
goods, using false weights and measures, and trading in products
injurious to health, such as alcohol and opium) boldly regarding
himself and being regarded by others, so long as he does not
directly deceive his colleagues in business, as a pattern of
probity and virtue. And if he spends a thousandth part of his
stolen wealth on some public institution, a hospital or museum or
school, then he is even regarded as the benefactor of the people
on the exploitation and corruption of whom his whole prosperity
has been founded: if he sacrifices, too, a portion of his ill-
gotten gains on a Church and the poor, then he is an exemplary
Christian.

A manufacturer is a man whose whole income consists of value
squeezed out of the workmen, and whose whole occupation is based
on forced, unnatural labor, exhausting whole generations of men.
It would seem obvious that if this man professes any Christian or
liberal principles, he must first of all give up ruining human
lives for his own profit. But by the existing theory he is
promoting industry, and he ought not to abandon his pursuit. It
would even be injuring society for him to do so. And so we see
this man, the harsh slave-driver of thousands of men, building
almshouses with little gardens two yards square for the workmen
broken down in toiling for him, and a bank, and a poorhouse, and a
hospital--fully persuaded that he has amply expiated in this way
for all the human lives morally and physically ruined by him--and
calmly going on with his business, taking pride in it.

Any civil, religious, or military official in government employ,
who serves the state from vanity, or, as is most often the case,
simply for the sake of the pay wrung from the harassed and
toilworn working classes (all taxes, however raised, always fall
on labor), if he, as is very seldom the case, does not directly
rob the government in the usual way, considers himself, and is
considered by his fellows, as a most useful and virtuous member of
society.

A judge or a public prosecutor knows that through his sentence or
his prosecution hundreds or thousands of poor wretches are at once
torn from their families and thrown into prison, where they may go
out of their minds, kill themselves with pieces of broken glass,
or starve themselves; he knows that they have wives and mothers
and children, disgraced and made miserable by separation from
them, vainly begging for pardon for them or some alleviation of
their sentence, and this judge or this prosecutor is so hardened
in his hypocrisy that he and his fellows and his wife and his
household are all fully convinced that he may be a most exemplary
man. According to the metaphysics of hypocrisy it is held that he
is doing a work of public utility. And this man who has ruined
hundreds, thousands of men, who curse him and are driven to
desperation by his action, goes to mass, a smile of shining
benevolence on his smooth face, in perfect faith in good and in
God, listens to the Gospel, caresses his children, preaches moral
principles to them, and is moved by imaginary sufferings.

All these men and those who depend on them, their wives, tutors,
children, cooks, actors, jockeys, and so on, are living on the
blood which by one means or another, through one set of blood-
suckers or another, is drawn out of the working class, and every
day their pleasures cost hundreds or thousands of days of labor.
They see the sufferings and privations of these laborers and their
children, their aged, their wives, and their sick, they know the
punishments inflicted on those who resist this organized plunder,
and far from decreasing, far from concealing their luxury, they
insolently display it before these oppressed laborers who hate
them, as though intentionally provoking them with the pomp of
their parks and palaces, their theaters, hunts, and races. At the
same time they continue to persuade themselves and others that
they are all much concerned about the welfare of these working
classes, whom they have always trampled under their feet, and on
Sundays, richly dressed, they drive in sumptuous carriages to the
houses of God built in very mockery of Christianity, and there
listen to men, trained to this work of deception, who in white
neckties or in brocaded vestments, according to their
denomination, preach the love for their neighbor which they all
gainsay in their lives. And these people have so entered into
their part that they seriously believe that they really are what
they pretend to be.

The universal hypocrisy has so entered into the flesh and blood of
all classes of our modern society, it has reached such a pitch
that nothing in that way can rouse indignation. Hypocrisy in the
Greek means "acting," and acting--playing a part--is always
possible. The representatives of Christ give their blessing to
the ranks of murderers holding their guns loaded against their
brothers; "for prayer" priests, ministers of various Christian
sects are always present, as indispensably as the hangman, at
executions, and sanction by their presence the compatibility of
murder with Christianity (a clergyman assisted at the attempt at
murder by electricity in America)--but such facts cause no one any
surprise.

There was recently held at Petersburg an international exhibition
of instruments of torture, handcuffs, models of solitary cells,
that is to say instruments of torture worse than knouts or rods,
and sensitive ladies and gentlemen went and amused themselves by
looking at them.

No one is surprised that together with its recognition of liberty,
equality, and fraternity, liberal science should prove the
necessity of war, punishment, customs, the censure, the regulation
of prostitution, the exclusion of cheap foreign laborers, the
hindrance of emigration, the justifiableness of colonization,
based on poisoning and destroying whole races of men called
savages, and so on.

People talk of the time when all men shall profess what is called
Christianity (that is, various professions of faith hostile to one
another), when all shall be well-fed and clothed, when all shall
be united from one end of the world to the other by telegraphs and
telephones, and be able to communicate by balloons, when all the
working classes are permeated by socialistic doctrines, when the
Trades Unions possess so many millions of members and so many
millions of rubles, when everyone is educated and all can read
newspapers and learn all the sciences.

But what good or useful thing can come of all these improvements,
if men do not speak and act in accordance with what they believe
to be the truth?

The condition of men is the result of their disunion. Their
disunion results from their not following the truth which is one,
but falsehoods which are many. The sole means of uniting men is
their union in the truth. And therefore the more sincerely men
strive toward the truth, the nearer they get to unity.

But how can men be united in the truth or even approximate to it,
if they do not even express the truth they know, but hold that
there is no need to do so, and pretend to regard as truth what
they believe to be false?

And therefore no improvement is possible so long as men are
hypocritical and hide the truth from themselves, so long as they
do not recognize that their union and therefore their welfare is
only possible in the truth, and do not put the recognition and
profession of the truth revealed to them higher than everything
else.

All the material improvements that religious and scientific men
can dream of may be accomplished; all men may accept Christianity,
and all the reforms desired by the Bellamys may be brought about
with every possible addition and improvement, but if the hypocrisy
which rules nowadays still exists, if men do not profess the truth
they know, but continue to feign belief in what they do not
believe and veneration for what they do not respect, their
condition will remain the same, or even grow worse and worse. The
more men are freed from privation; the more telegraphs,
telephones, books, papers, and journals there are; the more means
there will be of diffusing inconsistent lies and hypocrisies, and
the more disunited and consequently miserable will men become,
which indeed is what we see actually taking place.

All these material reforms may be realized, but the position of
humanity will not be improved. But only let each man, according
to his powers, at once realize in his life the truth he knows, or
at least cease to support the falsehoods he is supporting in the
place of the truth, and at once, in this year 1893, we should see
such reforms as we do not dare to hope for within a century--the
emancipation of men and the reign of truth upon earth.

Not without good reason was Christ's only harsh and threatening
reproof directed against hypocrites and hypocrisy. It is not
theft nor robbery nor murder nor fornication, but falsehood, the
special falsehood of hypocrisy, which corrupts men, brutalizes
them and makes them vindictive, destroys all distinction between
right and wrong in their conscience, deprives them of what is the
true meaning of all real human life, and debars them from all
progress toward perfection.

Those who do evil through ignorance of the truth provoke sympathy
with their victims and repugnance for their actions, they do harm
only to those they attack; but those who know the truth and do
evil masked by hypocrisy, injure themselves and their victims, and
thousands of other men as well who are led astray by the falsehood
with which the wrongdoing is disguised.

Thieves, robbers, murderers, and cheats, who commit crimes
recognized by themselves and everyone else as evil, serve as an
example of what ought not to be done, and deter others from
similar crimes. But those who commit the same thefts, robberies,
murders, and other crimes, disguising them under all kinds of
religious or scientific or humanitarian justifications, as all
landowners, merchants, manufacturers, and government officials do,
provoke others to imitation, and so do harm not only to those who
are directly the victims of their crimes, but to thousands and
millions of men whom they corrupt by obliterating their sense of
the distinction between right and wrong.

A single fortune gained by trading in goods necessary to the
people or in goods pernicious in their effects, or by financial
speculations, or by acquiring land at a low price the value of
which is increased by the needs of the population, or by an
industry ruinous to the health and life of those employed in it,
or by military or civil service of the state, or by any employment
which trades on men's evil instincts--a single fortune acquired in
any of these ways, not only with the sanction, but even with the
approbation of the leading men in society, and masked with an
ostentation of philanthropy, corrupts men incomparably more than
millions of thefts and robberies committed against the recognized
forms of law and punishable as crimes.

A single execution carried out by prosperous educated men
uninfluenced by passion, with the approbation and assistance of
Christian ministers, and represented as something necessary and
even just, is infinitely more corrupting and brutalizing to men
than thousands of murders committed by uneducated working people
under the influence of passion. An execution such as was proposed
by Joukovsky, which would produce even a sentiment of religious
emotion in the spectators, would be one of the most perverting
actions imaginable. (SEE vol. iv. of the works of Joukovsky.)

Every war, even the most humanely conducted, with all its ordinary
consequences, the destruction of harvests, robberies, the license
and debauchery, and the murder with the justifications of its
necessity and justice, the exaltation and glorification of
military exploits, the worship of the flag, the patriotic
sentiments, the feigned solicitude for the wounded, and so on,
does more in one year to pervert men's minds than thousands of
robberies, murders, and arsons perpetrated during hundreds of
years by individual men under the influence of passion.

The luxurious expenditure of a single respectable and so-called
honorable family, even within the conventional limits, consuming
as it does the produce of as many days of labor as would suffice
to provide for thousands living in privation near, does more to
pervert men's minds than thousands of the violent orgies of coarse
tradespeople, officers, and workmen of drunken and debauched
habits, who smash up glasses and crockery for amusement.

One solemn religious procession, one service, one sermon from the
altar-steps or the pulpit, in which the preacher does not believe,
produces incomparably more evil than thousands of swindling
tricks, adulteration of food, and so on.

We talk of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. But the hypocrisy of
our society far surpasses the comparatively innocent hypocrisy of
the Pharisees. They had at least an external religious law, the
fulfillment of which hindered them from seeing their obligations
to their neighbors. Moreover, these obligations were not nearly
so clearly defined in their day. Nowadays we have no such
religious law to exonerate us from our duties to our neighbors (I
am not speaking now of the coarse and ignorant persons who still
fancy their sins can be absolved by confession to a priest or by
the absolution of the Pope). On the contrary, the law of the
Gospel which we all profess in one form or another directly
defines these duties. Besides, the duties which had then been
only vaguely and mystically expressed by a few prophets have now
been so clearly formulated, have become such truisms, that they
are repeated even by schoolboys and journalists. And so it would
seem that men of to-day cannot pretend that they do not know these
duties.

A man of the modern world who profits by the order of things based
on violence, and at the same time protests that he loves his
neighbor and does not observe what he is doing in his daily life
to his neighbor, is like a brigand who has spent his life in
robbing men, and who, caught at last, knife in hand, in the very
act of striking his shrieking victim, should declare that he had
no idea that what he was doing was disagreeable to the man he had
robbed and was prepared to murder. Just as this robber and
murderer could not deny what was evident to everyone, so it would
seem that a man living upon the privations of the oppressed
classes cannot persuade himself and others that he desires the
welfare of those he plunders, and that he does not know how the
advantages he enjoys are obtained.

It is impossible to convince ourselves that we do not know that
there are a hundred thousand men in prison in Russia alone to
guarantee the security of our property and tranquillity, and that
we do not know of the law tribunals in which we take part, and
which, at our initiative, condemn those who have attacked our
property or our security to prison, exile, or forced labor,
whereby men no worse than those who condemn them are ruined and
corrupted; or that we do not know that we only possess all that we
do possess because it has been acquired and is defended for us by
murder and violence.

We cannot pretend that we do not see the armed policeman who
marches up and down beneath our windows to guarantee our security
while we eat our luxurious dinner, or look at the new piece at the
theater, or that we are unaware of the existence of the soldiers
who will make their appearance with guns and cartridges directly
our property is attacked.

We know very well that we are only allowed to go on eating our
dinner, to finish seeing the new play, or to enjoy to the end the
ball, the Christmas fete, the promenade, the races or, the hunt,
thanks to the policeman's revolver or the soldier's rifle, which
will shoot down the famished outcast who has been robbed of his
share, and who looks round the corner with covetous eyes at our
pleasures, ready to interrupt them instantly, were not the
policeman and the soldier there prepared to run up at our first
call for help.

And therefore just as a brigand caught in broad daylight in the
act cannot persuade us that he did not lift his knife in order to
rob his victim of his purse, and had no thought of killing him, we
too, it would seem, cannot persuade ourselves or others that the
soldiers and policemen around us are not to guard us, but only for
defense against foreign foes, and to regulate traffic and fetes
and reviews; we cannot persuade ourselves and others that we do
not know that men do not like dying of hunger, bereft of the right
to gain their subsistence from the earth on which they live; that
they do not like working underground, in the water, or in stifling
heat, for ten to fourteen hours a day, at night in factories to
manufacture objects for our pleasure. One would imagine it
impossible to deny what is so obvious. Yet it is denied.

Still, there are, among the rich, especially among the young, and
among women, persons whom I am glad to meet more and more
frequently, who, when they are shown in what way and at what cost
their pleasures are purchased, do not try to conceal the truth,
but hiding their heads in their hands, cry: "Ah! don't speak of
that. If it is so, life is impossible." But though there are
such sincere people who even though they cannot renounce their
fault, at least see it, the vast majority of the men of the modern
world have so entered into the parts they play in their hypocrisy
that they boldly deny what is staring everyone in the face.

"All that is unjust," they say; "no one forces the people to work
for the landowners and manufacturers. That is an affair of free
contract. Great properties and fortunes are necessary, because
they provide and organize work for the working classes. And labor
in the factories and workshops is not at all the terrible thing
you make it out to be. Even if there are some abuses in
factories, the government and the public are taking steps to
obviate them and to make the labor of the factory workers much
easier, and even agreeable. The working classes are accustomed to
physical labor, and are, so far, fit for nothing else. The
poverty of the people is not the result of private property in
land, nor of capitalistic oppression, but of other causes: it is
the result of the ignorance, brutality, and intemperance of the
people. And we men in authority who are striving against this
impoverishment of the people by wise legislation, we capitalists
who are combating it by the extension of useful inventions, we
clergymen by religious instruction, and we liberals by the
formation of trades unions, and the diffusion of education, are in
this way increasing the prosperity of the people without changing
our own positions. We do not want all to be as poor as the poor;
we want all to be as rich as the rich. As for the assertion that
men are ill treated and murdered to force them to work for the
profit of the rich, that is a sophism. The army is only called
out against the mob, when the people, in ignorance of their own
interests, make disturbances and destroy the tranquillity
necessary for the public welfare. In the same way, too, it is
necessary to keep in restraint the malefactors for whom the
prisons and gallows are established. We ourselves wish to
suppress these forms of punishment and are working in that
direction."

Hypocrisy in our day is supported on two sides: by false religion
and by false science. And it has reached such proportions that if
we were not living in its midst, we could not believe that men
could attain such a pitch of self-deception. Men of the present
day have come into such an extraordinary condition, their hearts
are so hardened, that seeing they see not, hearing they do not
hear, and understand not.

Men have long been living in antagonism to their conscience. If
it were not for hypocrisy they could not go on living such a life.
This social organization in opposition to their conscience only
continues to exist because it is disguised by hypocrisy.

And the greater the divergence between actual life and men's
conscience, the greater the extension of hypocrisy. But even
hypocrisy has its limits. And it seems to me that we have reached
those limits in the present day.

Every man of the present day with the Christian principles
assimilated involuntarily in his conscience, finds himself in
precisely the position of a man asleep who dreams that he is
obliged to do something which even in his dream he knows he ought
not to do. He knows this in the depths of his conscience, and all
the same he seems unable to change his position; he cannot stop
and cease doing what he ought not to do. And just as in a dream,
his position becoming more and more painful, at last reaches such
a pitch of intensity that he begins sometimes to doubt the reality
of what is passing and makes a moral effort to shake off the
nightmare which is oppressing him.

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