No Bullet Will Ever Reach This Bird

Robert Ingersoll was a lawyer, speaker and social activist, one of the best-known figures in the movement for freedom of thought and expression, and one of the prominent nineteenth-century American opponents of slavery. I have translated the passage below, an excerpt from one of his striking essays on the importance of individuality in civilisation, so that I can share with you the pleasure of reading it.

“In every age there are men and women who have found the courage to think independently of others and to express what they believe. I think it was Magellan who said: the Church says the earth is flat, but in studying the heavens I have personally seen the earth’s shadow upon the moon and found that shadow not to be flat. The truth is that I trust even a shadow I have seen for myself more than what the Church tells me I must believe.

We must all remember that the true meaning of becoming like others is ceasing to resemble ourselves. Everything of value produced in the history of human civilisation—in art, science and culture—has come from individuals who discovered their unique individuality and gave it to human civilisation. The world itself is an embodiment of diversity. No two human beings have ever been identical, just as no two leaves of a tree are entirely alike. The world celebrates diversity, because beauty and truth are created from this diversity. In such a colourful world, the uniqueness and singularity of every human being should become a powerful force through which truth and beauty can manifest themselves more fully.

In a society where each person destroys their individuality in order to conform to the crowd, each person in effect agrees to become the jailer of the Self. In such a society, suppressing honesty and suppressing the individual’s free search for understanding and questioning ideas is not merely the suppression of freedom; it is the destruction of a society’s dynamism and inner unity. In such a society every request for reform will be regarded as evidence of betrayal of the prevailing thought, because no one is permitted to think anything other than what they have been required to accept.

We must all reject the command of authoritarianism not to think, and refuse to sell our free thought into slavery. Those who want everyone to bear their colour and become slaves to their beliefs would never find the power and audacity to look people in the eye and, before a crowd, proclaim the most unacceptable, unbelievable and inhuman claims in the name of social laws that must be obeyed, if the majority of those people simply demonstrated that each of them possesses an independent individuality and a free mind distinct from the authoritarian institution. If only they showed that their individual responsibility toward others is to think independently and to give their unique talents to society, rather than to defend a doctrine they have been told, as members of a group, to defend without asking what it is or why it should be defended.

The suppression of honesty is the most shameful form of repression, and the cheapest bargain any person can make when confronted by such suppression is to sell truth cheaply for the lie we have been asked to hide from ourselves. Is there anything more terrifying than looking inward and discovering that everything you believe is merely what you were told, and that to discover your own values you must search your memory? To belong to human herds without individuality whose cries of ‘death to’ and ‘long live’ you repeat, shouting after them ‘execute him’ and ‘crucify him’ because others want and do the same. To reach the end of the road one day and discover that the only valuable thing you ever did for the advancement of truth in the world was to leave it.

There is nothing more magnificent or beautiful than to remain, regardless of your loneliness, an honest seeker of truth, able to look at yourself in the mirror and see that one person without whom the forces of truth in the world would have been one person fewer. To be able to tell yourself in solitude that even if you could not remove the chains from your own hands and feet or from those of your people, you at least freed your thought from its chains. That your mind no longer recognises a wall or a chain and can fit inside no prison. To see your own power: that no prison can imprison what you have freed within yourself, no boot can crush what you have released, and no bullet will ever reach the bird you have set free from its cage.”

Aydin Areta
February 2020