But still more revolting to us are all these hypocritical forms employed to make us consider sacred the theatrical buffooneries, with which the bourgeoisie surround their sinister motives, and which they have not the courage to avow frankly. And what is most revolting to us is the attitude of all these mountebanks who, under pretense of attacking the existing regime, attack only the men who apply its texts and the manner in which they apply them, but take good care to respect the essence itself, making believe that there may be a number of methods of applying the law and that among that number there is but one good one; that among the men who climb into power some may be found honest enough, broad enough in their views, men, in short, the like of whom does not exist, who will be able to disentangle this one good method and make use of it to the satisfaction of all. Truly, we know not which to admire most: the knavery of those who utter these stupidities, or the naivete of those who continue to look up to this farce, the entire weight of which they alone support. It is hard to understand that, amongst the countless number of persons who have undergone the examinations of “justice,” not one has yet been found sufficiently free from prejudice to go and lift up the robes of those who had struck him and show the public that all these togs serve but to mask men subject to the same weaknesses and errors as the rest of humanity, not counting the crimes inspired by their class interests.
Hence for us Anarchists, who attack authority, legality is one of those hypocritical forms which we must most energetically assail, in order to tear off the tinsel which serves to hide the recantations and the shames of those who govern us. Too long have these mummeries been respected; too long have the people believed that these institutions emanated from some superior essence which, causing them to float in an ethereal sphere, enabled them to soar above human passions. Too long have people believed in men distinct from their fellows, men of a special mould, charged with distributing here below—“from each according to his necessities, to each according to his needs”—that ideal justice which each regards from his own point of view, according to the condition in which he is placed; justice which these men filled as they are with the most backward and superannuated ideas, have codified in order to defend the exploitation and enslavement of the weak by those who have managed to create and force upon others their own predominance. It is time to break with these absurdities and openly attack these worm-eaten institutions whose aim is to lessen human personality; the free man does not admit this claim of individuals arrogating to themselves the right to judge and condemn other individuals. The idea of justice, such as existing institutions imply, has fallen with that of divinity; the one involved the other. The idea of God’s inspiring magistrates with the verdict to be pronounced caused the infallibility of man’s justice to be accepted, as long as the masses were backward enough to believe in a super-terrestrial existence, in some benevolent being existing outside of the material world, busying itself with what went on on our planet, and regulating the actions of all the people who inhabited it. But the belief in God being destroyed, faith in the supernatural having disappeared, human personality alone remaining with all its defects and passions, this inviolability and supreme character which are the essence of divinity, and with which the magistracy re-invested itself in order to keep itself above society, must likewise disappear, and allow those whose eyes have been opened to see what is really hidden by these—oppression and exploitation of one class by another, fraud and violence elevated into a principle and transformed into “social institutions.”
Science has helped us to lift the veil; it has furnished us with the weapons which have assisted to strip the colossus. It is too late for it to be able effectually to turn backward and endeavor to reconstitute in the name of the metaphysical entity, society, what it has wrested from the metaphysical entity, divinity. The savants must manage to eliminate from themselves, completely, the bourgeois education they have received, and study social phenomena with the same strictness and disinterestedness with which they have approached the study of any special science. Then, when they are no longer influenced by considerations or prejudices foreign to science, they will no longer conclude in favor of the condemnation of criminals, but like we, rather, in favor of the destruction of a social state which makes it possible that there should be within its bosom, and because of its own vicious organization, some persons reputed honest, and others reputed criminal.
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The Influence of Environment
This is a truth which is beginning to
