About the author
Mikhail Bakunin, full name Mikhail Aleksandrovich
Bakunin, (from May 30, 1814, to June 19, 1876). Born into an aristocratic
Russian family, having all the affluence at his disposal, rebelled against his
own destiny, threw away all his nobility, and rose to become a revolutionary.
Socialist by nature and rational by mind, today the world remembers him
as the father of ‘Collectivist Anarchism’. God and State considered to be his
finest work, was not written by him as he never completed it. The book came
into being as the collection of his ideas and thoughts.
Book
Before we began to explore this masterpiece, a small caveat to all the readers, the book is not written in a traditional way, where the author has a plot, a theme, a beginning, a middle, and an end. The book is a collection of ideas and thoughts of Mikhail Bakunin. Having said this, let explore 'God
and The State'.
To begin with, the book showcases Bakunin's complete rejection of the influence of religion and the authority of the State on one’s character.
He argues that the authority of both the Religion and State are interlinked and one needs another to sustain in some form or other. According to him, it is the
religion that led people to believe in divine beliefs (why they are divine
because they are not logical) and these beliefs further make people to
subjugate their being to some higher divine authority. From here, he
questions the authority of God itself.
Drawing an analogy from Bible, he asks why God, the super being, who knows everything, could not know what Adam and Eve were going to do? and above
all, why God, the ultimate being, did not want Adam and Eve
to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge? The answer Bakunin provides (in
rhetoric) is in stark contrast to what religious scholars taught their
disciples:
“Jehovah and Satan- Jehovah wants the man to remain all his life an eternal
beast without mind of his own while it is the Satan that rebelled and led
the adam and eve to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge so that they
can have what Jehovah did not want them to have at the first place, power to
think."
So at the very beginning, Bakunin is ruthlessly turns the table upside down, and questions the very naive question as who will decide who is good and who is evil? Isn’t the same debate, we Indians are debating thousands of years related to Devtas Vs. Asuras. Thousands of movies, literature, and folk cultures in India gave their own interpretations.
Bakunin rejects the idea of God and Evil and straight away equates everyone into one category only i.e. human. According to Bakunin, humans are born with a mind that has the capacity to generate thoughts but it's up to them whether they utilize their life for their evolution or surrender their soul for nothing. For the evolution of mankind, Bakunin says there is a three-step process. 1. Human animality, 2. Thoughts and 3. Rebellion. These are the three-stage processes for human evolution. How? Let’s understand.
Humans are born with animal instincts, kill and eat to survive but at the same time have the ability to think, the thoughts, the regular occurrence of them lead the humans towards the formation of ideas that are rooted in practicality and rationality. We may call these ideas and understanding generated from rational thinking ‘rational beliefs’. These are the rational beliefs that have led the human civilization from the stone age to the age of science and made us realize that every human at the end of the day is equal. But then we meet the biggest enemy of rational beliefs
i.e. the divine beliefs, these are the forces of evil that tend to crush rationality, it's here the last step must be taken with full force i.e.
the rebellion. Rebelling against divinity is the only way to attain freedom and liberty. The underline process can be best summarised in the language of
Bakunin itself:
“Men in whom the sentiment of equality is born to suffer themselves no longer
to be governed; they learn to govern themselves”
So far, we learn that Bakunin has his bias against religious divinity and
State authority but one must ask the most pertinent question ‘why?’ Is there any basis for that or it’s just to become a rebel without a cause?
Let understand both the concept of religious divinity and State authority through his lens.
Religious Divinity
Here, Bakunin has two explanations to offer, First, that every evolution
and understanding flow in a natural order i.e. from the lower to the higher,
from inferior to superior and from the relatively simple to more complex,
from inorganic to organic. But the religious idealist obsessed with divine
phantom, take just opposite route i.e. from higher to lower, from superior
to inferior, from complex to simple. They began with God as a divine
substance and then lower down the credentials to the human as per their
suited hierarchy. In the language of Bakunin:
“They begin with God, either as a person or as divine substance or idea,
and the first step that they take is a terrible fall from the sublime
heights of the eternal ideal into the mire of the material world; from
absolute perfection into absolute imperfection; from thought to being, or
rather, from supreme being to nothing.”
Second, religious divinity cannot be followed with rationality as both are at loggerheads with each other. The divinity requires men to surrender his identity, character and the beliefs that he has generated through his experience of nature. On the other hand, the very objective of rationality is to identify the nature of man and understand his own existence and surroundings. So, in nutshell, one, who possess religious divinity cannot
have rationality and vice-versa.
Now, one may ask that if it is so clear that divinity blinds men then why men tend to follow such a suit? For this, we need to look no further,
Bakunin has an answer ready for the same. He blamed two factors for such a
scenario. First and very simple, it is hard to find out your own way through the rough patches of sufferings to discover and explore the unending possibilities of one’s mind than to just simply give up and being governed by some unseen force. For, rationality is not too keen to meet those who refused to meet themselves. Let read down Bakunin a little further:
“The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is
the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the
enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice. He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish allusions about the
matter, but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.”
Second and more complex is the wretched situation to which one finds oneself fatally condemned, by the economic organization of society even in the most civilized countries.
Reduced intellectually and morally as well as materially, to the minimum of human existence, confined in one’s life like a prisoner in one’s own prison.
In such situation, when one is left with nowhere to go, the devils of heaven unleash their maximum potential to enslave one. Finally, Bakunin takes refuge
in Voltaire’s words:
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. For, you
understand, the people must have a religion.”
So, how Bakunin define Religion then? Let read the author himself:
“All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their
messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who
had not attained the full development and full possession of their
faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but a mirage in
which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovers his own image, but
enlarged and reversed—that is, divinized”
Well, well, well, don’t stop there. Bakunin has one plus point for
Christianity, according to him Christianity is the religion
par excellence…… why?
“Because it exhibits and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and the essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity
for the benefit of divinity.”
Okay, fair enough, so if God is the evil, then what must be done?........... Just reverse the phrase of Voltaire, says Bakunin:
“if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him”
Here, we come to the end with religious divinity. Now, we must endeavor to understand what is wrong with Authority.
The Authority
Before we dwell on the bigger question as to what is authority, what is wrong with it, and how would a State function without having legitimate power to regulate its subjects. First, we must understand whose ‘Authority’ we are
talking about.
According to Bakunin, authority again is of two types. 1. Natural authority
and 2. Legislative authority.
Natural Authority is the inevitable power of natural laws which manifest themselves in the necessary concatenation and succession of phenomena in the physical and social worlds. One cannot revolt against these laws, for these laws govern the entire habitat. Revolt against these laws is not only forbidden but even impossible. One may misunderstand them but cannot disobey them because they
constitute the basis and fundamental conditions of our existence; they
envelop us, penetrate us, regulate all our movements, thoughts, and acts;
even when we believe that we disobey them, we only show their omnipotence.
Explaining the power of these laws, Bakunin wrote:
“We are absolutely the slaves
of these laws. But in such slavery there is no humiliation, or, rather, it
is not slavery at all. For slavery supposes an external master, a legislator
outside of him whom he commands, while these laws are not outside of us;
they are inherent in us; they constitute our being, our whole being,
physically, intellectually, and morally: we live, we breathe, we act, we
think, we wish only through these laws. Without them we are nothing, we are not. Whence, then, could we derive the power and the wish to rebel against
them?”
In other words, this authority is our character, our existence, our mind that cannot be stopped thinking as it’s against the very law for which it is created. Our nature,
which shapes our character cannot be changed by any outside factor. In short
, we have to follow these natural laws not because we are bound to follow them but we cannot be done with them. We cannot free ourselves from these laws because these are the very laws that provide us freedom from slavery.
Now coming to legislative authority, as Bakunin describes above, is meant to have an external master, who commands and we follow, it’s him who decides our fate, our destiny, our life, and our beliefs. Such an authority, according to
Bakunin is dangerous for human evolution because it restricts the very objective for every human life to aspire….liberty.
Since we read Bakunin’s both natural and legislative authority theory.
Now, we must ask the next pertinent question ‘what is wrong with legislative authority? How, without it, a State is supposed to function?
To this very question, Bakunin believes that legislative authority has
already failed in achieving its objective. The very reason for which the legislative mechanism was put in place in form of democracies around the
world, after throwing away the Monarchies, was to demolish the concept of
‘privilege’, because, according
to Bakunin, privilege has only and only one characteristic of its own that
it kills the mind and heart of men and when your mind and heart is killed,
how can you have the sense and sensibilities for other people?
But whether giving the power back into the hands of people has solved this problem? Bakunin answers it in negative, he argues that the very first thing one gets in abundance, once become a legislator is the privilege.
Thereafter, the same cycle continues.
Now, taking all the above discussion into consideration, the final question which heads directly into our head is “so where the truth lies? If divinity is just a fake illusion, Authority is slavery, them, in which direction should we move? what should we aspire to achieve? Bakunin, with smuggy smile answer in one word…………………………….’Liberty’
And how to achieve it? Well……follow the three-stage process he talked about in
the beginning.
Favorite quote:
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