A Decline in Courage

• 04 August 2008 at 15:01
• Politik Pop

I am still looking for my political vision of the world. I've just read some excerpts from the speech A Decline in Courage written in 1978 by Solzhenitsyn, that french newspaper Liberation quoted to pay tribute to the russian dissident who passed away last night. This speech talks about the same problems as today.

When the modern Western states were being formed, it was proclaimed as a principle that governments are meant to serve man and that man lives in order to be free and pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American Declaration of Independence.) Now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state. Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and in such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the debased sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades.

In the process, however, 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. This active and tense competition comes to dominate all human thought and does not in the least open a way to free spiritual development.

Found on Discours d'Harvard de Soljenitsyne [Erratique]

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