No More Learning

' And
authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of
over-fed barbarism amongst us.

With authority, punishment will pass away. This will be a great gain--a
gain, in fact, of incalculable value. As one reads history, not in the
expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the
original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by
the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that
the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised
by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence
of crime. It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the
more crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly
recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish punishment as far
as it thinks it can. Wherever it has really diminished it, the results
have always been extremely good. The less punishment, the less crime.
When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist,
or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing
form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness. For what are called
criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is
the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals
are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological
point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins.
They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be
if they had not got enough to eat. When private property is abolished
there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to
exist. Of course, all crimes are not crimes against property, though
such are the crimes that the English law, valuing what a man has more
than what a man is, punishes with the harshest and most horrible
severity, if we except the crime of murder, and regard death as worse
than penal servitude, a point on which our criminals, I believe,
disagree.
But though a crime may not be against property, it may spring
from the misery and rage and depression produced by our wrong system of
property-holding, and so, when that system is abolished, will disappear.
When each member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is
not interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any
interest to him to interfere with anyone else. Jealousy, which is an
extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion closely
bound up with our conceptions of property, and under Socialism and
Individualism will die out. It is remarkable that in communistic tribes
jealousy is entirely unknown.

Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to
do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise
labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary
commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to
make what is beautiful. And as I have mentioned the word labour. I
cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and
talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing
necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is
absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do
anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour
are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To
sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is
blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or
physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy
would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing
dirt.