Wit & Attitude Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin writes like a man trying to keep his own mind from being requisitioned. “Such a faith” isn’t spiritual comfort; it’s the kind of belief that asks you to stop thinking in exchange for belonging. The sentence is engineered as a cascade of losses: first reason (the internal compass), then liberty (the political body), then even “the success of my undertakings” (the practical, worldly stakes). He’s not just arguing that dogma is wrong; he’s warning that it makes you ineffective. That’s a revolutionary’s fear: not damnation, but becoming useless.

The subtext is a diagnosis of power. Faith, in Bakunin’s usage, is a technology for outsourcing judgment. Once you hand over the right to doubt, you’ve created an opening for administrators, priests, party leaders, or “well-meaning” intellectuals to drive your life. The brutality of “stupid slave” is deliberate: he’s rejecting the flattering story that obedience is noble. It’s not purity, it’s stupor. The final turn - “an instrument of the will and interests of others” - names the end state: your convictions become someone else’s tool.

Context matters: Bakunin, the 19th-century anarchist rival to Marx within the First International, watched revolutions curdle into hierarchies. His target is any absolute - church, state, or vanguard party - that demands faith as proof of loyalty. The line reads less like abstract philosophy than a personal oath: no cause is worth the surrender of self-government, because surrender is exactly how new tyrannies recruit their workforce.