Homo Sapiens: In the Maelstrom by Stanislaw Przybyszewski and translated by Joe E Bandel
“That’s why it must be eliminated, just as one eliminates madmen who commit crimes without knowing it.”
“So only the harmful consequences decide about crime?” “Yes.”
“But suppose you blow up a factory for the sake of the idea and thereby plunge hundreds of families into misery, then you commit a crime because the consequences are criminal.”
“No! For thereby I bring my idea closer to realization and I bring millions happiness. When Christ spread his teaching, he knew very well that thousands of his followers would be sacrificed, so he delivered them to certain ruin to bring millions salvation.”
“You believe in God?” Olga asked absentmindedly. Czerski suddenly fell into great excitement.
“I believe in Jesus Christ, the God-man… But don’t interrupt me. I have the right to it, nature taught it to me. What decides about the pleasantness of a feeling? Not that it is pleasant in itself.
The habituation to opium is very painful at first, only in length becomes pleasure. So only the duration of the same decides about the final nature of the feeling. It is self-evident that the first consequences of a factory explosion are unpleasant, but…”
“So you will shrink from no crime?”
“No, no crime,” he interrupted her eagerly, “I will shrink from no action that guarantees my idea victory.”
“And if your idea is false?”
“It is not false, for it is built on the only truth we have: love.”
“But if your means are false?”
“They cannot be false, for their motives are love. By the way, I don’t want to resort to these means at all, even if I should hold it necessary. I have no program like the anarchists. I want to commit no act of violence so as not to be counted to a party that has violence in its program.”
“Out of vanity?”
“No; out of caution, only out of caution, so that the anarchists, thus a party, do not believe they have the right to regard my act as the consequence of their program.”
“You are ambitious.”
“No! But I am only in my act. I have only one right, and that is: to be. And my being is my act. Yes, I have an ambition if you want to call it so: to be, to be through my act. I am not as soon as I execute foreign commands.”
“Those are old thoughts, dear Czerski.”
“I don’t know if they are old, I got them in prison and so they are my own. I thought them out with great effort. I was not used to thinking as long as I was in the party. Now I have detached myself from everything to be alone and determine my act with my own thoughts.”
“And if you hadn’t got the money from Falk, would you have taken it?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you want to do now?”
“I want to teach people to sacrifice themselves.”
Olga looked at him questioningly.
“To be able to sacrifice oneself: that is the first condition of every act. I will teach the enthusiasm of sacrifice.”
“But to sacrifice oneself, one must first believe in the purpose of sacrifice.”
“No! The sacrifice does not spring from faith, but from enthusiasm. That is it precisely. See, all previous parties have faith but no enthusiasm. No, they have no faith, they have only dogmas. Social democracy has died in dogmatic faith. Social democracy is what every religious community is: it is faithful without enthusiasm. Is there a person who would go into the fire for his God? No! Is there a social democrat who would plunge into ruin without reservation, without hesitation, for his idea? No! They all have the calm, comfortable certainty of faith; their dogmas are iron truths for whose sake one, God knows, need not get excited. But I want to create the fiery, glowing faith, a faith that is no longer faith because it has no purpose, a faith that has dissolved in the enthusiasm of sacrifice.”
He suddenly fell into an ecstatic state. His eyes shone and his face transfigured itself peculiarly.
“So you speculate on the fanaticism of hate in the masses.”
“Fanaticism of love,” he said radiantly, “fanaticism of love for the infinity of the human race, love for the eternity of life, love for the thought that I and humanity are one, inseparably one…”
He varied the thought in the most diverse expressions.
“I will not say: Sacrifice yourselves so that you and your children become happy, I will teach anew the happiness of sacrifice in itself. Humanity has an inexhaustible capacity to sacrifice itself, but the fat church and fat socialism destroyed that. Humanity has forgotten the happiness of sacrifice in the fat, disgusting dogmatic faith. The last time it tasted it in the great revolutions, in the Commune—purposeless, only out of love for sacrifice, to enjoy once more the infinite happiness of purposeless selflessness… And I will bring this happiness back to memory through my act…”
He suddenly stopped and looked at Olga suspiciously.
“You probably believe I am a mad fantasist?”
“It is beautiful, very beautiful what you said there—I understand you,” she said thoughtfully.
He was silent long.
“Yes, you are right that those are old thoughts,” he said suddenly. “They touch in many ways what Falk expressed at the congress in Paris. I would have liked to kiss his hand then…”
He suddenly became very restless.
“But it did not become a life matter for him. His brain figured it out. His heart caught no fire… No, no—how is it possible to have such thoughts and not perish with shame that one can say all that cold and calm… See, that is the shamelessness of his brain, that it cannot shudder at it. His brain is shameless… He is a—an evil person. He is not pure enough for his ideas. One must be Christ, yes, Jesus Christ, the God of humans, the holy source of willingness to sacrifice.”
“You have changed very much, Czerski. By the way, I didn’t know you. Kunicki slandered you. I will think much about what you said…”
Olga stood up and looked at him shyly.
Over his face lay a transfigured glow. She had never seen anything like it.
“Take care of yourself, Czerski. You look very sick.” “No, I am not sick. I am happy.”
He thought long.
“Yes, yes,” he said suddenly, “yesterday I was still a small person. But now it is over, it is past…”
Anarchistbanjo's World 
Leave a comment