Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/60

 Rh At first it seems strange that men who do not know what they themselves need, can imagine that they know clearly and indubitably what the whole community needs; and yet it is just because they do not know what they need, that they imagine they know what the whole community needs.

The dissatisfaction they (lacking all guidance for their lives) dimly feel, they attribute not to themselves, but to the badness of the existing forms of social life, which differ from the one they have invented. And in cares for the rearrangement of society they find a possibility of escaping from consciousness of the wrongness of their own lives. That is why those who do not know what to do with themselves are always particularly sure what ought be done with society as a whole. The less they know about themselves, the more sure they are about society. Such men for the most part are either very thoughtless youths, or are the most depraved of social leaders, such as the Marats, Napoleons and Bismarcks; and that is why the history of the nations is full of most terrible evil-doings.

The worst effect of this imaginary fore-knowledge of what society should be, and of this activity directed to the alteration of society, is that it is just this supposed knowledge and this activity which more than anything else hinders the movement of the community along the path natural to it for its true welfare.

Therefore to the question, "What will the lives of the nations be like which cease to obey power?" we reply that we not only do not know, but ought not to suppose that anyone can know. We do not know in what circumstances these nations will be placed when they cease to obey power; but we know indubitably what each one of us must do, that those conditions of national life should be the very best. We know, without the least doubt, that in order to make those conditions the very best, we must first of all abstain from acts of violence which the existing power demands of us, as well as from those to which men fighting against the existing power to establish a new one, invite us; and we must therefore not obey any power. We must refuse to