Notice that the indications are exactly the same: the same self-satisfaction and blind assurance that we, just we and only we, are on the real path and are the first to tread it: the self-same expectation that there-directly-we shall discover something extraordinary; and above all the same sign exposing us, namely, that all our wisdom remains with us while the mass of the people neither understand, nor accept, nor need it. Our position is a very sad one, but why not face it as it is?
It is time to come to our senses and look around us.
For we are indeed nothing but scribes and Pharisees who have seated ourselves in Moses’ seat and taken the keys of the kingdom of heaven, neither entering in ourselves nor allowing others to enter. We priests of science and art are the most worthless frauds, with far less right to our position than the most cunning and depraved Church priests. For we have absolutely no right to our privileged position, we obtained it by guile and keep it by fraud.
The pagan priests and the clergy of our own and of the Catholic Church, however depraved they may be, or have been, had this right to their position-that they at least proposed to teach life and salvation to the people. We have undermined them and proved that they deceived, and have taken their place, but we do not teach people how to live: we even admit that it is no use trying to learn this. Yet we suck the juice out of the people, and in return teach our children our Talmud of Greek and Latin grammar, that they in their turn may continue to lead the same parasitic life as we do.
We say, there used to be castes but we have none. But how is it that some people and their children work while other people and their children do not? Bring a Hindu who does not know our language and show him our life as it has gone on for generations, and he will recognize the same two chief, distinct castes of workers and non-workers as exist among his people. As with them so with us, the right not to work is given by a special initiation, which we call science and art and in general-education.
It is this education, and the whole perversion of reason attached to it, that has brought us to the amazing state of insanity which causes us not to see what is so clear and indubitable.
We consume the lives of our brother men, and continue to consider ourselves Christian, humane, educated, and perfectly justified.
CHAPTER XXXVIII ‘WHAT then must we do? What must we do?’
This question-including an admission that our way of life is wrong and bad, together with a suggestion that all the same it is impossible to change it-this question I hear from all sides, and for that reason I chose it as the title of my work.
I have described my sufferings, my search, and my solution of this question. I am a man like everybody else, or if I am at all different from an ordinary man of our circle it is chiefly that I have served and connived at the false teaching of our world more than he, have been more praised by the men of the dominant school and have therefore been perverted and gone astray more than others.
And therefore I think the solution I have found for myself will be valid for all sincere men who set themselves the same question. First of all, to the question: What must we do? I replied to myself: I must not lie either to myself or to others, nor fear the truth wherever it may lead me. We all know what lying to other people means, and yet we lie unceasingly from morning to night: ‘Not at home,’ when I am at home; ‘Very pleased,’ when I am not at all pleased; ‘My respects,’ when I do not respect; ‘I have no money,’ when I have some, and so on. We consider lies to other people, especially certain kinds of lies, to be bad, but are not afraid of lying to ourselves; yet the very worst, most downright and deceptive lie to others, is as nothing in its consequences compared with that lie to ourselves on which we have built our whole life.
That is the lie we must not be guilty of, in order to be able to answer the question: What must we do?
How can the question be answered when all I do, my whole life, is based on a lie and I carefully give out this lie as truth to others and to myself? Not to lie, in that sense, means not to fear the truth, not to invent excuses to hide from myself the conclusions of reason and conscience, and not to accept such excuses when they are invented by others: not to fear to differ from all those around me or to be left alone with reason and conscience, and not to fear the position to which truth will lead me, believing firmly that what truth and conscience will lead me to, however strange it may be, cannot be worse than what is based on falsehood. Not to lie in our position as privileged mental workers, means not to fear to make up one’s accounts.
Perhaps we already owe so much that we cannot meet our obligations, but however that may be it is better to face the facts than not to know how we stand. However far we may have gone along a false path, it is better to return than to continue to go along it. Falsehood to others is simply disadvantageous. Every affair is settled more directly and more quickly by truth than by falsehood. Falsehood to others only confuses the matter and hinders its solution, but falsehood to oneself presented as truth, entirely ruins man’s life.
If a man having started on a wrong road accepts it as the right one, every step he takes along that road takes him farther from his aim. If a man who has been going for a long time along a false road guesses, or is told, that that road is wrong, but being frightened at the thought that he has gone so far astray tries to assure himself that by following this road he may still come out on the right one, he will never reach the right road. If a man is frightened of the truth, and on seeing it does not acknowledge it but accepts falsehood for truth, he will never know what he should do.
We, not only rich men but men in a privileged position, so-called educated men, have gone so far along a false road that we need either great resolution, or the experience of great suffering on our false path, to enable us to come to ourselves and acknowledge the lie in which we are living.
Thanks to the sufferings to which the false path led me, I saw the falsehood of our life, and having acknowledged it I had the courage (at first only in thought) to follow reason and conscience without considering what they would lead me to. And I was rewarded for that courage. All the complex, disjointed, confused, unmeaning phenomena of life around me became at once clear, and my position amid those phenomena, which had been a strange and burdensome one, suddenly became natural and easy. And in that new situation my activity determined itself quite exactly, and was nothing like what I had previously imagined it would be, but was a new activity much more tranquil, agreeable, and joyous. The very things that formerly frightened me now became attractive.
And therefore I think that a man who sincerely sets himself the question, What to do? and in answering it does not lie to himself but goes the way his reason leads him, will have already answered the question. If only he does not lie to himself he will find out what to do, where to go and how to act. The one thing which may hinder his finding the way is a false and too high estimate of himself and his position. So it was with me and therefore a second reply-which flows from the first-to the question: What to do? consisted for me in repenting, in the full significance of that word, that is, completely changing my estimate of my own position and activity. Instead of considering our position useful and important, we just acknowledge its harmfulness and triviality; instead of priding ourselves on our education we must .admit our ignorance; in place of pride in our kindness and morality we must acknowledge our immorality and cruelty, and instead of our importance admit our insignificance.
I say that apart from not lying to myself I had also to repent, because, though the one flows from the other, a false impression of my high importance had so grown upon me that until I sincerely repented and put aside that false estimate of myself, I did not see the greater part of the lie I had told myself. Only when I repented, that is, ceased to consider myself a special kind of man and began to look on myself as a man like all others-only then did my path become plain to me.
Before that, I could not answer the question: What to do? because I put the very question wrongly. Till I repented I put the question thus: What activity shall I-a man
