No More Learning

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. 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.