The Pendulum of Thought

The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening. Then thought frees herself from the chains with which those interested have carefully enwound her.

She shatters the chains. She subjects to severe criticism all that has been taught her, and lays bare the emptiness of the religious, political, legal and social prejudices amid which she has vegetated. She starts research in new paths, enriches our knowledge with new discoveries, and creates new sciences.

But the inveterate enemies of thought – the government, the lawgiver, and the priest – soon recover from their defeat. By degrees they gather together their scattered forces, and remodel their faith and their code if laws to adapt them to the new needs. Then, profiting by the servility of thought and if character, which they themselves have so effectually cultivated, taking advantage of the laziness of some, the greed of others, they creep back to their work by first of all taking possession of childhood through education.

A child’s spirit is weak. It is so easy to coerce it by fear. This they do. They make the child timid, and then they talk to him of the torments of hell. They conjure up before him the sufferings of the condemned, the vengeance of an implacable god. The next minute they will be chattering of the horrors of revolutions to make the child “a friend of order.” The priest accustoms the child to the idea of law, to make it obey better what he calls the “divine law”, and the lawyer prates of divine law, that the civil law may be the better obeyed.

And by that habit of submission, with which we are only too familiar, the thought of the next generation retains this religious twist, which is at once servile and authoritative; for authority and servility walk hand in hand. During these slumberous interludes, morals are rarely discussed. Religious practices and judicial hypocrisy take their place. People do not criticize; they let themselves be drawn by habit, or indifference. They do not put themselves out for or against the established morality. They do their best to make their actions appear to accord with their professions.

All that was good, great, generous or independent in man little by little becomes moss grown; rusts like a disused knife. A lie becomes a virtue, a platitude a duty. To enrich oneself, to seize one’s opportunities, to exhaust one’s intelligence, zeal and energy, no matter how, become the watchwords of the comfortable classes, as well as of the crowd of poor folk whose ideal is to appear bourgeois. Then the degradation of the ruler and of the judge, of the clergy and of the more or less comfortable classes becomes so revolting that the pendulum begins to swing the other way.

Little by little, youth frees itself. It flings overboard its prejudices and its begins to criticize. Thought reawakens.

From Anarchist Morality by Peter Kropotkin