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comes from the Creator-God, something arbitrary and not identical with the GOOD creation^a itself. Now I cannot go into the history^b of dogma here, but we shouldn't go in an interest which sometimes appears in radical Protestantism^c [such] as that of the whole Barthian Neo-Orthodox school. We shouldn't, in this interest, make God^d a tyrant, His law^e heteronomous, because that only would have the consequence that we have to resist Him and to look for a God who is greater than this God, as Marcion^f and his friends did.

Now if this is clear, then we can go on and say: there is no OTHER external authority^g behind the categorical---or let me preliminarily call it the moral---imperative, ^heither. That which has replaced Godⁱ, in modern positivistic thinking, is society: the moral imperative comes from society. The profoundest form, I think, in which this has been done is done by Friedrich Nietzsche^j who, in his description of the genesis^k of conscience, describes it as the internalization of the rules of a ruling class, which can maintain its rule only if the laws^l are not forced from outside only, but also put into the internal situation, into the internal feeling of man, made a matter of conscience of everybody, which even works if the policeman is around the next corner.

Now this is the main point of this theory, which tries to show that the experience of the moral imperative^m ("you SHALL, though OUGHTEST, to do this!") is the result of an internalized policeman, the policeman in ourselves. But this policeman in ourselves is a product of a ruling group which cleverly realized that its control of society is safe ONLY if ITS interests are affirmed by the conscience of the subjects.