This is a truth which is beginning to be recognized and is making its way in the scientific world; the modifying influence of environments upon organized beings is no longer combated save by the old fogies of official science. It is acknowledged today that the soil and climate, the obstacles or advantages in the way of living found by the organisms of a continent, have an influence upon their development as great as the other laws by which, exclusively, their adaptation or their tendencies to variability have heretofore been sought to be explained, if not indeed, greater. As to man, who has always been made a separate and distinct being, the new truth was harder to admit; the more so that he, also, is able to transform the environment by which evolved. But at length it was admitted that man, like all other animals, is subject to the same influences and evolved under the pressure of the same original causes. When it became necessary to explain his moral evolution according to the same laws, the task was still more difficult; and even some of those who deny free will, who recognize that man acts only under the pressure of external circumstances⁠—even some of those cannot accept the law in all its consequences⁠—that is to say, so far as to trace the causes of man’s criminality to the entire social organization and to demand the transformation of the latter. The boldest⁠—and they are rare⁠—admit indeed in principle, that the social organization is bad, that it needs reforms, that some of its institutions beget misdemeanors; but to them the grand culprit is still the evil nature of mankind which necessitates a bridle upon their passions, and which society, defective as it is, can alone succeed in repressing. Moreover, in order to minimize the responsibility of society as a whole, they cut up the social environment into several slices, which they likewise baptize with the name of environments, and upon which they saddle the evil effects of the influence produced. As to society, they say, it does, perhaps, leave something to be desired; but such as it is, it protects the weak against the wicked, guarantees individuals in the free exercise of their right to labor, and furnishes them a surer, more effective, and cheaper protection than as if they were forced to defend themselves. In a word, they conclude, society is a contract of mutual insurance established between individuals; if misdemeanors occur, they are much more attributable to the evil nature of man than to the social organization itself.

Certainly we are far from pretending that man is a model of perfection: indeed he is a sorry animal enough, who, when he is not crushing his fellows under his heel, licks the heels of those who crush him; but summing it all up, man does not act exclusively under the influence of bad instincts, and the beautiful sentiments of love, charity, fraternity, devotion, and solidarity, sung and exalted by poets, religionists, and moralists, prove to us that, though he sometimes act under the impulse of evil sentiments, he has a fund of idealism, a yearning after perfection; and it is this yearning which society represses and prevents from developing.

Man is not created unique, either morally or physically. Like other animals, of which he is but a superior specimen, he is the product of a concourse of circumstances, of combination and association of matter. He has struggled to develop himself, and if he has contributed in a large measure to the transformation of the environment wherein he is situated, the latter has in turn influenced the customs he has adopted, his manner of living, thinking, and acting. Under the empire of his character and passions, therefore, he established society, and continues to have a certain amount of influence upon its operations. But it must not be forgotten that he has continued to evolve since the establishment of society, while the latter, after being organized in various groups, has always remained based upon authority and property. Changes of detail have been brought about by revolutions; power and property have changed hands, passed from one caste to another; but society itself has not ceased to be based upon the antagonism of individuals, the competition of their interests; nor has it ceased to press down with all its weight upon the development of their minds. Surrounded by society they are born into the world, within the environment it offers them they acquire their first ideas, and learn a mass of prejudices and lies which they come to recognize as false only after many centuries of criticism and discussion. Hence we are bound to acknowledge that the influence of the social environment upon the individual is immense, that it weighs upon him with all the heft of its institutions, with the collective strength of its members and that acquired by the long duration of its existence, whilst the individual, in reacting upon it, is reduced solely to his unaided strength.

Society, which is a first essay at solidarity, should have for its object the betterment of individuals, teaching them to practice this solidarity in view of which they have come together, to love each other as brothers, leading them to put all things in common: joys, pleasures, gratifications, pains, sorrows, and sufferings, toil and production. Society has, on the contrary, found nothing better to do than to divide them into a number of castes, which may be resolved into two principle ones: governors and possessors on the one side, the governed and non-possessors on the other. On the side of the first contentment and plethora; on the side of the second misery, privation, and anaemia; the result of which division is to pose these two categories of individuals as enemies, between whom a ferocious war is perpetuated⁠—a war which can end only in the irretrievable enslavement of the second or the complete destruction⁠—so far as concerns class privilege at least⁠—of the first.

But the defective and ill-conceived organization of society into two distinct classes does not stop here in its pernicious effects. Based upon antagonism of interests it opposes individual against individual within each class; it sows warfare among them by its institution of private property which forces people to hoard in order to secure themselves against the morrow those necessaries which society cannot guarantee to them. Private competition is the great actuating force of the present society; whatever be the business, profession, or kind of work to which people devote themselves, they have to fear the competition of those who choose the same department of activity. To increase their incomes, their chances of success, or sometimes simply not to go under themselves, they are forced to speculate in the ruin of their competitors. Even when they league together it is always only to the detriment of those dependent upon their special occupation. Founded upon this struggle between individuals, society makes of every creature the enemy of all others; it provokes war, crime, theft, and all the misdemeanors which are attributed to the evil nature of man, though they are but the consequence of the social order, and which society helps to perpetuate, though under the new moral notions acquired by humanity they would totally disappear.

This struggle between individuals has the effect of leading the possessors to make war upon each other, to divide them and prevent them from seeing their caste interest, which would be to work to ensure their powers of exploitation by avoiding and stalling everything which would open the eyes of the exploited⁠—a war which causes them to commit a multitude of mistakes that contribute largely to their downfall. If the capitalistic classes were truly united among themselves, if their members no longer had private interests and were moved solely by the interests of caste, given the power which the possession of fortune, authority, and all the administrative machinery, coercive and executive, secures to them, given their intellectual development, necessarily superior to that of the workers the nourishment of whose brains they apportion to the nourishment of their bodies, the bourgeoisie might, for an indefinite period, rivet upon the exploited the yoke of poverty and dependence under which it now holds them. Happily the thirst to own, to shine, to parade, and to amass, makes them give themselves up to a warfare among themselves not less cruel than that in which they engage the workers. Eager to possess, they heap error upon error; the workers finally take an account of things, become acquainted with the causes whence flows their misery, and conscious of the subjection in which they are held.

But the same war which goes on among the capitalists goes on also among the workers; and while the first compromises the stability of the bourgeois edifice, the second helps to secure its continued existence. Forced to struggle among themselves in order to snatch the vacancies in these dungeons which the capitalists offer them, the workers regard each other as so many enemies while they are led to consider him who exploits them as a benefactor. Starved by the bourgeoisie, who in exchange for their toil give them just enough to keep them from dying of hunger, they are, at the very start, led to treat as an enemy the one who comes into the workshop to compete with them for the place they have had so much trouble to obtain. The scarcity of these vacancies again sharpens the competition, causing them to offer themselves at a lower price than their competitors. So that the anxiety of the daily struggle for daily bread makes them forget that their worst enemies are their masters. For the bourgeoisie, strengthened, it is true, by fortune, intellectual supremacy, and the possession of the governmental forces, are, after all, but a feeble minority in comparison with the multitude of workers; nor would the former be long in surrendering to the more numerous class, had they not found means for dividing the latter and making the same contribute to the defense of their privileges.

All this, therefore, certainly shows us that man is far from being an angel. He has even been a brute in the fullest acceptation of the word; this is true enough also. When men first became organized into societies they based these societies upon their instincts for struggle and mastery; and this explains why society is so badly constructed. Only, society has remained bad. Its authority resting in the hands of a minority, the latter have turned it to their own profit; and the more society has evolved the more this concentration of power in the hands of a few has tended to increase and develop the evil effects of these ill-omened institutions. Man, on the contrary, in proportion as his brain has developed, as facilities for procuring the means of subsistence have increased, has felt evolving within him that sentiment of solidarity which he had already obeyed in founding the first groups. This sentiment of solidarity has become such a necessity that religions have carried it to the extreme of sacrifice, preaching charity and self-renunciation, and therein finding a new element for exploitation. To what dreams of social reorganization, of plans for the happiness of humanity has the longing to live harmoniously with our fellows not given birth! But society was there, stifling with all its weight the good instincts of man, reviving in him his savage primitive egoism, forcing him to consider other people as so many enemies whom he must overthrow in order not to be overthrown himself, accustoming him to look with a dry eye upon those who disappear, ground up in the monstrous gearing of the social mechanism, he being powerless to help them under pain of being caught himself in the same insatiable jaws, which mainly devour the good and the innocent who yield to their humanitarian sentiments, allowing the survival only of the malicious who have learned how to push others into those jaws in order to delay their own fall.

You make a great outcry against the lazy, against thieves and assassins; you berate the “fundamentally evil” side of human nature; and you do not perceive that these vices would most naturally disappear were they not supported and developed by the social organization. How can you expect a man to be a worker when, in the organization which governs us, work is considered degrading, reserved for the Pariahs of society, and since the cupidity of those who exploit him has made it a torture and a slavery? How can you expect to be free from lazy people when the ideal, the goal of attainment for everybody who wants to rise in the world is to succeed in amassing, by no matter what means, money enough to live without doing anything or by making others work? The greater the number of slaves a person manages to exploit, the higher his situation and the more respect he receives; the greater, likewise, the amount of income he gets out of it. You have made society a hierarchy, with the top of the social scale (considered as a reward for merit, intelligence, and industry) reserved precisely for those who have never done anything! Those who by one means or another have succeeded in perching on the summit, eat, drink, and wanton, without the slightest employment for their ten fingers. They offer the spectacle of their idleness and indulgence to the exploited, who, at the bottom of the ladder, sweat, suffer, and produce for them, receiving in exchange just enough to keep from starving to death, without being able to hope to get out of their condition but by some stroke of chance. And you are astonished that people have a tendency to want to live without doing anything! For our own part we are astonished at one thing only: that there are still people stupid enough to work! In the presence of the example furnished him by society, the individual’s ideal cannot be anything else but to succeed in making other people work, in exploiting others in order not to be exploited himself. And when the means of legally exploiting him of his labor fail, other devices are sought. Commerce and finance are also licit methods, accepted by the law, yielding enormous incomes when followed on a big scale, but to which, when one is able to go in only on a small scale, are added certain proceedings which enable one to walk between the borders of the code and even excuse one for stepping on them a little if one can do it without getting caught. Fraud and deceit are the exceedingly useful auxiliaries which enable one to increase his income manifold.

For those who cannot operate under these conditions another resource is left: the exploitation of human credulity, swindling, and other analogous methods. Lower still there remain brutal robbery and assassination. According to the means at one’s disposal, according to the environment in which one has grown up, one or another of the methods just enumerated is made use of, or they may perhaps be combined in order to escape as long as possible, the severities of the code which is supposed to defend society. Poverty and suffering, this is the lot of the workers; leisure and all sorts of indulgence to those who by force, cunning, or the right of birth, have become their parasites. Here is solidarity for you!

How can you expect people not to tear each other in pieces, when they must ask themselves how they and theirs are to eat on the morrow if their competitor obtain the place in the workshop which they themselves covet? How can you expect solidarity in them when they reflect that the mouthful of bread which they sometimes give to the beggar passing by, may fail them later? How could they think about solidarity when they are forced to struggle every day for the conquest of bread; when there are a multitude of enjoyments which will ever remain a closed paradise to them? It may be, perhaps this necessity for locking elbows in the struggle which has brought them nearer together, little by little transformed this sentiment into the desire to love one’s neighbor; but however that may be, it is to society that we must trace the responsibility for the survival of the war between individuals and the animosities which flow from it. How can you expect that men will not desire what is bad, when they know that the disappearance of such or such a person will allow them to go up another round of the ladder, that the disappearance of such another is a chance in favor of their getting the place they covet, the elimination of a dangerous competitor? How should a man resist the evil instigations of his nature, when he knows to a certainty that what will be an injury to his neighbor must be a benefit to himself? You say that man is evil! We say that he must have strong tendencies to become good or society would get on worse than it does, and crimes and disasters would be of more frequent occurrence.

In spite of all the stimulus of evil surroundings, man has been able to develop aspirations towards solidarity, harmony, and justice; and even these good sentiments have been exploited by those who live at his expense. These dreams of happiness, these tendencies towards something better, have given rise to a class of parasites who have speculated upon such aspirations by promising their realization. Still worse, these good sentiments have been punished as subversive of the social order; and in spite of all, the tendency of humanity is to move in the direction of their realization. And you dare to talk about the evil nature of man! The noble sentiments of humanity, its aspirations after liberty and justice have been hunted down and punished, because those who had succeeded in ridding themselves of the narrow and ferocious egoism which helps to perpetuate the present society, having begun to dream of an era of contentment and general harmony, ended by asking themselves how it happens that society, having been constituted for the advantage of all, turns out only to secure the privileges of the few. The unavoidable conclusion was that society is badly organized, that its institutions are vicious, that they must disappear in order to give place to a more equitable and rational organization. But, as those who are in possession do not wish to abandon their privileges, they have prohibited these aspirations as subversive; whence new struggles, new causes for the development of bad instincts.

The pernicious influence of society upon the morals of the individual being discovered, it is easy to suppress the bad instincts and develop the good. Your society based on antagonism of interests having produced the struggle between individuals, procreates the malevolent beast called “civilized man.” Conceive, then, an organization based, on the contrary, upon the strictest solidarity. Make it so that private interests shall no longer be opposed to each other, nor contrary to public interests. Make it so that personal well-being shall flow from the general well-being, or produce it. Make it so that, in order to live and to enjoy, people need not fear the competition of their fellows. Make it so that by associating their energies and aspirations they may find their expectations realized thereby. Make it so that this association shall not be turned to the detriment of neighboring groups.

You are afraid of the lazy! Make work attractive. Instead of riveting it upon a small minority of society to whom it becomes a torture, do away with all your State machinery, your useless offices, and organize your society in such a way that each shall be led, by mere force of circumstances and not by any authority whatever, to cooperate in social production. Make work useful, necessary, and so that it may be a hygienic exercise instead of a torture. From the present organization you reap a harvest of wars, crimes, thefts, fraud, and misery. This is the result of private property and authority; it is the influence of environment making itself felt. If you would have a society in which reign confidence, solidarity, and well-being for all, base it upon liberty, reciprocity, and equality.