I searched on Google of what has been said about a “decline in courage”, and Boom! in the very first (perhaps only) place, I found Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address given at Harvard University June 8, 1978 titled “A World Split Apart”.
https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/a-world-split-apart
I could not believe my eyes, what an incredibly important speech, and to be so wittingly or unwittingly incredibly ignored. It is one of ours, the Western World’s, greatest loss.
Please, please, read it all.
What shouted out to me the most during my first reading was:
“Harvard’s motto is ‘Veritas’… truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter. A measure of bitter truth is included in my speech today, but I offer it as a friend, not as an adversary.”
“A kingdom—in this case, our Earth—divided against itself cannot stand.”
“A Decline in Courage: A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society… Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?”
[My comment: https://perkurowski.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-decline-in-courage-alexander.html]
Well-Being: One psychological detail has been overlooked: The constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to this end imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to carefully conceal such feelings.
The individual’s independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of the people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, preparing them for and summoning them toward physical bloom, happiness, the possession of material goods, money, and leisure, toward an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures. So who should now renounce all this, why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as yet distant land?
Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to take off its pernicious mask.
Legalistic Life: I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of man. A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.
And it will be simply impossible to bear up to the trials of this threatening century with nothing but the supports of a legalistic structure.
The Direction of Freedom: An outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus, mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints.
The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror.
Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.
This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man—the master of this world—does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected.
The Direction of the Press: The press, too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word “press” to include all the media.) But what use does it make of it?
There is no true moral responsibility for distortion or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to the readership or to history?
Because instant and credible information is required, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be refuted; they settle into the readers’ memory.
In the Communist East, a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has voted Western journalists into their positions of power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?
Unrestrained freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership, because newspapers mostly transmit in a forceful and emphatic way those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and that general trend.
A Fashion in Thinking: Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. A selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development.
This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era.
Socialism: Many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of no longer being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. And this causes many to sway toward socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.
Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
[My comment: By much favoring banks to hold government debt over lending to the private sector the regulators, in 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, introduced a version of Marxism or Fascism that has empowered a Bureaucracy Autocracy.]
http://subprimeregulations.blogspot.com/2015/07/just-before-fall-of-berlin-wall.html
Not a Model: A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human personality in the West while in the East it has become firmer and stronger…. There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy… But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive.
Loss of Will: No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons even become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, in this case, but concessions, attempts to gain time, and betrayal. Western thinking has become conservative: The world situation must stay as it is at any cost; there must be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society that has ceased to develop.
[My comment: The fearful response to Covid was another occasion in which the holy intergenerational contract Edmund Burke wrote about was violated.]
https://perkurowski.blogspot.com/2020/10/all-we-are-saying-is-give-herd-immunity.html
Humanism and Its Consequences: How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility? … we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately… gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today… a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice… becoming ever more materialistic… man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer.
[My comment: “The Western World was built-up with lots of risk-taking resulting from its Christian heritage.”]
[My comment: “Peter L. Bernstein wrote that the boundary between the modern times and the past is the mastery of risk, since for those who believe that everything was in God’s hands, risk management, probability, and statistics, must have seemed quite irrelevant. I myself cannot but speculate on whether we’re not leaving out God’s hand, just a little bit too much.]
https://subprimeregulations.blogspot.com/2008/10/we-need-brand-new-bank-regulations.html
An Unexpected Kinship: The current of materialism which is farthest to the left, and is hence the most consistent, always proves to be stronger, more attractive, and victorious. Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition. The Communist regime in the East could endure and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who (feeling the kinship!) refused to see communism’s crimes, and when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify these crimes… In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. And yet Western intellectuals still look at it with considerable interest and empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.
[My comment: “I automatically learned to classify all that is repugnant as an »inheritance from the past», and all that is attractive as the »seed of the future». With the aid of this automatic classification, it was still possible for a European in 1932 to visit Russia and continue to be a communist.” Arthur Koestler, “The Invisible Writing” 1954.]
https://perkurowski.blogspot.com/1999/05/all-bureaucrats-should-be-created-equal.html
Before the Turn: There is a disaster which is already very much with us. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.
On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.
It is not possible that assessment of the president’s performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline.
Today it would be retrogressive to hold on to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Such social dogmatism leaves us helpless before the trials of our times.
We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him?
If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.
[My comment: In Geocentric and Heliocentric terms, do risks to bank systems revolve around what’s perceived as risky or what’s perceived as safe? Could I be silenced by the Neo-Inquisition?]
http://subprimeregulations.blogspot.com/2023/04/in-my-heliocentric-fight-against.html
"This ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but—upward."
[Amen]
Where do I come from?
http://subprimeregulations.blogspot.com/2004/11/some-of-my-early-public-opinions-on.html
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