A Decline in Courage: Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his Commencement Address at Harvard University, 1978.
An extract from “A World Split Apart”. Please, when you can, read it all!
“A Decline in Courage: 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. There remain many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.
Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.
And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts of boldness and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?"
Some of my many comments on this theme:
By favoring banks to hold assets perceived (or decreed) as safe over assets perceived risky, the regulators introduced a risk aversion anathema to what made our Western World great.
Risk aversion, lack of courage, produced credit risk weighted bank capital requirements.
In America, the Home of the Brave, these favor the refinancing of parents’ “safer” present over the financing of children’s’ “riskier” future.
The too frightened response to the Covid-19 pandemic, quietly accepted by a too frightened and docile herd, is causing anintergenerational conflict of monstrous proportions.
“Risk aversion comes at a cost - the other side of the Basel [Committee’s regulatory risk weighted capital requirements] coin might be many, many developing opportunities foregone." http://subprimeregulations.blogspot.com/2003/03/financial-sector-assessments-program.html
What would you think of a military high command that ordered a testosterone reducer to be fed to the soldiers, so they would expose themselves less to risks, and so fewer of them would die? A guaranteed defeat?
#AI ChatGPT - OpenAI: With risk weighted bank capital requirements, did regulators impose a lousy diet with way too much carbs and way too little proteins?
The Western World was built-up with massive amounts of risk taking.
The Basel Committee for Banking Supervision, 1988 introduced in it, massive risk aversion.
1964: Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Tage Erlander, Swedish Prime Minister; (translator)
50 years later.
2014: David Cameron British Prime Minister; Angela Merkel German Chancellor; Fredrik Reinfeldt Swedish Prime Minister; Mark Rutte Dutch Prime Minister
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