OPPRESSOR OR HERETIC

Camus’ diagnosis is unsparing. The revolutionary who began with a clear sense of injustice drifts in time toward one of two destinies. He becomes an oppressor, taking power and using it the way the old regime used it. Or he becomes a heretic, accused by his former allies of betraying the cause, expelled from the movement he helped create. There seems to be no third path.

The pattern repeats because something in the structure of revolt makes it likely. The rebel takes hold of a value worth defending. To defend it, he organizes. To win, he must use force. To keep his position, he must enforce conformity. By the time he looks up, the value has dissolved into machinery, and the only choices left are to operate the machinery or to be crushed by it.

Camus did not write this to discourage revolt. He wrote it as a warning to the rebel about his own future. If you take up a cause, watch where it leads you. Notice when the cause begins to require things you would once have refused to do. The bigger danger is not that your revolt will fail. It is that it will succeed in a way that destroys what you were fighting for.

In your own life, ask the question on the smaller scale. Where has a stand you once took become a position you now defend by methods you would once have refused? That is where the trajectory has begun.

See also: Two limits that need each other (May 17), The restraints it chooses (May 18)