No More Learning

When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, 'Let
the dead bury the dead,' was his terrible answer. He would allow no
claim whatsoever to be made on personality.

And so he who would lead a Christ-like like life is he who is perfectly
and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of
science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep
upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about
God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who
throws his net into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as
he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation
in morals and in life is wrong. Through the streets of Jerusalem at the
present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his
shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation.
Father Damien was Christ-like when he went out to live with the lepers,
because in such service he realised fully what was best in him. But he
was not more Christ-like than Wagner when he realised his soul in music;
or than Shelley, when he realised his soul in song. There is no one type
for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men. And
while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the
claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.

Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to. As a
natural result the State must give up all idea of government.
It must
give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before
Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such
thing as governing mankind. All modes of government are failures.
Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably
made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and
ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of
democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by
the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was
high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who
exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is
violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by
creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and
Individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount
of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully
demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible
pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a
sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that
they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other
people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's
second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. 'He
who would be free,' says a fine thinker, 'must not conform. ' 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.