Ilyin begins fiery in this chapter, calling the "moralists" vague and inconsistent, and he's right. We see this exact same behavior today with people who refuse to see the world as it is and attribute good morals and motivations to folks who just don't have any or to excuse behavior as a "quirk" or "being different". Ilyin also points out that these people are 100% self-absorbed so their delusion rarely impacts their internal world in any meaningful way, and since they don't truly care what happens to others, they don't have an emotional reaction when a bad thing happens (it didn't imapct me, so why should I care?).
Ilyin points out the hypocrisy of Tolstoy and his followers believing both that the natural world has no violence in it and also that everything done against anyone else's wishes is violence. He points out that the moralists decried seeking wealth and property as evil (socialism) and that they insisted that before any one has a child, all other children must be provided for first (again, socialism). This is yet another parallel to our modern society where child-bearing is shunned and treated as unnecessary. Ironically, no other creature in creation does this to their own species.
The list of things that the moralists (Tolstoy's followers and "Red Russians") wanted or were opposed to could be pulled from our struggles today, 100 years later. He lists: Only physical labor is work and the benefit of someone else's labor is sinful, the need to abolish land ownership, they wanted to abolish hiring employees and paying rent, abolish laws and the military, limit factory production, eliminate the idea of money, and they wanted to abolish hunting and the eating of meat. Weird, isn't it?
Tolstoy, in his writings, said that even if confronted with a man holding a knife to a victim while he himself had a revolver, he could not intervene. Tolstoy said "I don't know if the man will strike the victim with the knife, but I know that my bullet will kill him.". Tolstoy's position is that God's Will is what determines whether or not the victim is killed and we cannot interfere with that. Of course, that is ludicrous on it's face and Ilyin spends a few paragraphs pointing that out. In my mind, perhaps God put me there specifically to save one life and potentially more down the road by ending this one evil soul.
The moralists, and today's leftists, hide from the struggle between good and evil by blurring the lines nad saying that no one can judge another's morals and that intervening in their actions (even robbery or assault) is against the will of God. Saying that, according to Ilyin, is a dodge meant to absolve them of anything in the world that doesn't directly impact them.
Tolstoy's people took it a step further, declaring that stopping someone from harming another (even a child) is immoral and blasphemy, because you are interrupting God's Will. To believe this, Ilyin rightly points out, we'd have to beleive that God wants the innocent to be killed by the wicked and children abused. That is just ridiculous on it's face, but we hear the same argument today, 100 years later.
This idea leads to victimhood and victim worship, while offers absolutely no deterrence to the offender. The offender has literally no reason to stop, as no one will attach any consequence. Ilyin points out the hypocrisy of pretending to love nad have sympathy while also allowing crime to go on undeterred.
Ilyin closes by reminding us that Tolstoy's moralist have a religious lack of will and a spiritual indifference, neither of which come from God.
Let me know your thoughts below.
