Moribund Society and Anarchy

assassins; you berate the “fundamentally evil” side of human nature; and you do not perceive that these vices would most naturally disappear were they not supported and developed by the social organization. How can you expect a man to be a worker when, in the organization which governs us, work is considered degrading, reserved for the Pariahs of society, and since the cupidity of those who exploit him has made it a torture and a slavery? How can you expect to be free from lazy people when the ideal, the goal of attainment for everybody who wants to rise in the world is to succeed in amassing, by no matter what means, money enough to live without doing anything or by making others work? The greater the number of slaves a person manages to exploit, the higher his situation and the more respect he receives; the greater, likewise, the amount of income he gets out of it. You have made society a hierarchy, with the top of the social scale (considered as a reward for merit, intelligence, and industry) reserved precisely for those who have never done anything! Those who by one means or another have succeeded in perching on the summit, eat, drink, and wanton, without the slightest employment for their ten fingers. They offer the spectacle of their idleness and indulgence to the exploited, who, at the bottom of the ladder, sweat, suffer, and produce for them, receiving in exchange just enough to keep from starving to death, without being able to hope to get out of their condition but by some stroke of chance. And you are astonished that people have a tendency to want to live without doing anything! For our own part we are astonished at one thing only: that there are still people stupid enough to work! In the presence of the example furnished him by society, the individual’s ideal cannot be anything else but to succeed in making other people work, in exploiting others in order not to be exploited himself. And when the means of legally exploiting him of his labor fail, other devices are sought. Commerce and finance are also licit methods, accepted by the law, yielding enormous incomes when followed on a big scale, but to which, when one is able to go in only on a small scale, are added certain proceedings which enable one to walk between the borders of the code and even excuse one for stepping on them a little if one can do it without getting caught. Fraud and deceit are the exceedingly useful auxiliaries which enable one to increase his income manifold.

For those who cannot operate under these conditions another resource is left: the exploitation of human credulity, swindling, and other analogous methods. Lower still there remain brutal robbery and assassination. According to the means at one’s disposal, according to the environment in which one has grown up, one or another of the methods just enumerated is made use of, or they may perhaps be combined in order to escape as long as possible, the severities of the code which is supposed to defend society. Poverty and suffering, this is the lot of the workers; leisure and all sorts of indulgence to those who by force, cunning, or the right of birth, have become their parasites. Here is solidarity for you!

How can you expect people not to tear each other in pieces, when they must ask themselves how they and theirs are to eat on the morrow if their competitor obtain the place in the workshop which they themselves covet? How can you expect solidarity in them when they reflect that the mouthful of bread which they sometimes give to the beggar passing by, may fail them later? How could they think about solidarity when they are forced to struggle every day for the conquest of bread; when there are a multitude of enjoyments which will ever remain a closed paradise to them? It may be, perhaps this necessity for locking elbows in the struggle which has brought them nearer together, little by little transformed this sentiment into the desire to love one’s neighbor; but however that may be, it is to society that we must trace the responsibility for the survival of the war between individuals and the animosities which flow from it. How can you expect that men will not desire what is bad, when they know that the disappearance of such or such a person will allow them to go up another round of the ladder, that the disappearance of such another is a chance in favor of their getting the place they covet, the elimination of a dangerous competitor? How should a man resist the evil instigations of his nature, when he knows to a certainty that what will be an injury to his neighbor must be a benefit to himself? You say that man is evil! We say that he must have strong tendencies to become good or society would get on worse than it does, and crimes and disasters would be of more frequent occurrence.

In spite of all the stimulus of evil surroundings, man has been able to develop aspirations towards solidarity, harmony, and justice; and even these good sentiments have been exploited by those who live at his expense. These dreams of happiness, these tendencies towards something better, have given rise to a class of parasites who have speculated upon such aspirations by promising their realization. Still worse, these good sentiments have been punished as subversive of the social order; and in spite of all, the tendency of humanity is to move in the direction of their realization. And you dare to talk about the evil nature of man! The noble sentiments of humanity, its aspirations after liberty and justice have been hunted down and punished, because those who had succeeded in ridding themselves of the narrow and ferocious egoism which helps to perpetuate the present society, having begun to dream of an era of contentment and