Live Not by Lies (1974)
solzhenitsyncenter.org
solzhenitsyncenter.org
"And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill."
It's important to stand up to lies and to speak against recognized propaganda for what it is, but how capable are we as a society even to recognize the propaganda and lies when we see them? And how many of us have the courage to do so in the face of it? When so many are in survival mode just to make it from one day to the next, this action tends to be deferred to some point in the future when those large masses of people have progressively less and less left to lose, with unfortunately often predictably violent outcomes, as history has shown.
Feel-good rhetoric aside, your impact as an individual is limited and your defenses are fragile. In real terms, speaking out in even the most diplomatic way leads you to being aggressively silenced for not endorsing whatever the Sacred Infallible Truth may be in the time period that you live in, and there can be very severe consequences that impact your weakest link; your livelihood. The best you can feasibly do as an everyman is try with the people closest to you; the people that trust and respect you. Your partner, your family, your friends, your children. This is your only feasible option.
The issue with the passage you quoted ("And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul...") is that it's a call to arms yet it ignores the reality that you have no weapons with which to fight.
Reading between the lines of your post; if your society insists on going down a certain self-destructive path there's not much you can feasibly do other than watch it and hope your perspective is the misguided one.
I think part of the message of the writing is that thinking of what’s “feasible” is the trap that prolongs the ideology of the time.
Yep, society can crush you and there’s not much you can do about it. But it won’t get better unless you stand against it anyway.
That’s one the hardest things you can do, but countless humans have done it before you, and we praise and honour them (when we remember them). So much of commemoration and remembrance rites/ceremonies is is trying to prolong the memory of their hard, but correct choice.
We even honour those who fought against “us” when we recognise the costs they knowingly paid for their beliefs.
It’s our capacity to be noble that the essay calls out to. And sure enough, it has a cost and may not succeed.
If you are guaranteed to fail, and speak out anyway, all the more noble. And perversely enough, if enough people agree that it’s worth doing despite the certainty of failure, suddenly success isn’t impossible anymore
I've had my own issues dealing with the world as it is, so I'm very glad I could make a difference for someone.
I wish you all the best with your struggles; you do whatever you can, and so will I. Hopefully there's enough of us to make a difference :)
People such as Solzhenitsyn prove that your impact as an individual can be staggeringly large. Individuals can shift the course of nations and effect the lives of hundreds of millions.
> ignores the reality that you have no weapons with which to fight
Again, Solzhenitsyn proves that you have the written word and it can be an extremely effective weapon.
> there's not much you can feasibly do other than watch it
You should really read a bit about this Solzhenitsyn fella for some counter examples. But of course very few individuals are willing to bear the burden it entails.
This perhaps is a reminder to pour a drop of wine in memory of those who didn't make it.
Giving your energy to a system you abhor, to sustain values you reject, to benefit people you oppose, for many people becomes more costly than the opprobrium, lost income, loss of status, etc. that can result from refusing to repeat the lies.
It's not even necessarily about changing the world. It's about living in a way that gives you peace and inner freedom. The essay calls it "spiritual independence".
Genuine question - you are from the west, am I correct? It seems to me (just my feelings, no hard evidence) that there is something that people from the west often miss. They construct their arguments about this topic as if only the external result of actions mattered. As if personal integrity did not have any intrinsic value. As if the point of "the courage to defend even his own soul" was to change something about the system and not just what it literally says.
When you say "your impact as an individual is limited", it is only true if you are talking about you impact on society. Your impact on yourself is huge. People who do not live "in truth" (whatever that means) know that about themselves. They might rationalize it, but deep down they know. You might frame it in psychological terms and talk about self-esteem, repressing stuff, loosing connection to your own emotions... my point is that the price people pay for not behaving in congruence with their true self might be high.
I feel this is why it is important to have the courage to defend your soul - because you need to defend your soul to live well (and by living well I mean "at peace with yourself", not external circumstances - those might actually get really shitty if you intend to live at peace with yourself in a totalitarian regime). Communism was horrible not just because the oppressors did bad things to the oppressed. It was also because many people, who would otherwise lived as decent human beings, compromised one way or the other, and they still have to live with themselves. There are still many people with crushed souls around here.
EDIT: I do not want this to sound like unsolicited mentoring from someone who knows better - I am thinking about my own integrity and courage with high level of doubt.
Wow, that's pretty apocalyptic. I can say pretty much whatever I want with little repercussion. I see people say pretty much whatever they want.
But the parent is the Sacred Infallible Truth: You'll notice it's repeated more than any other political position despite the rhetoric of rebellion.
> Sacred Infallible Truth
Are we mocking the idea of all truth and falsehood? Good and evil? Free choice and consequences? Should everyone just say whatever, without thinking of the consequences of their actions, and everyone else just ignore them? Why speak?
In the age of social media, we have witnessed the power of the collective when it comes to combating hate speech and hate entities. Sometimes all it takes is one courageous whistleblower to ignite the spark that leads to the dismantling of lies, and the deplatforming of those who spreads them.
I didn't meant to come off as being political, but the networking effect of the individual must not be underlooked.
Even worse, though, is that those fighting for justice don't view the individual as being of primary importance. Their allegiance is to a cause, and individuals are expendable; free speech is dangerous to that cause, and even more dangerous when it comes in the form of minor criticism from someone within the group, which is harder to caricature and dismiss.
The net result is that you have ostensible liberals who fight for justice squashing individuality - even going so far as to claim "individualism is a white construct" - while fascists get to masquerade as the upholders of individual rights and liberties. It's a farce because both sides are shamelessly, boot-licking craven lovers of groupthink and authoritarianism, but it's the "network effect" of social media - both the organizing and the deplatforming on both sides - that represses the individual inwardly and outwardly, and leads to them lying in service of populism.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22individualism+is+a+white+...
"At the same time that whites are taught to see their interests and perspectives as universal, they are also taught to value the individual and to see themselves as individuals rather than as part of a racially socialized group. Individualism erases history and hides the ways in which wealth has been distributed and accumulated over generations to benefit whites today. It allows whites to view themselves as unique and original, outside of socialization and unaffected by the relentless racial messages in the culture. Individualism also allows whites to distance themselves from the actions of their racial group and demand to be granted the benefit of the doubt, as individuals, in all cases. A corollary to this unracialized identity is the ability to recognize Whiteness as something that is significant and that operates in society, but to not see how it relates to one’s own life. In this form, a white person recognizes Whiteness as real, but as the individual problem of other “bad” white people (DiAngelo, 2010a)."
"As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:
• Perfectionism
• Sense of Urgency
• Defensiveness
• Quantity Over Quality
• Worship of the Written Word
• Paternalism
• Either/Or Thinking
• Power Hoarding
• Fear of Open Conflict
• Individualism
• Only One Right Way
• Progress is Bigger, More
• Objectivity
• Right to Comfort"
And:
"While there is some value in students being able to complete work independently, when this is the only or most common avenue for learning or practicing, it reinforces individualism and the notion that I’m the only one. This does not give value to collectivism and community understanding, and fosters conditions for competition and individual success, which perpetuates the idea that if a student is failing it is because they are not trying hard enough or that they don’t care."
[2] * https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... *, 6
[3] Ibid, 63
As an aside, I don't even think the attempt to slander "individualism" as white supremacy is nearly the most alarming or offensive thing on a list that also degrades objectivity, promotes open conflict, and bashes writing - the most basic defining feature of civilization. As a Jewish person, I also can't help thinking that "Worship of the Written Word" is a direct assault on Judaism, a religion in which the sanctity of life and the sanctity of the written word go hand in hand. In fact, disrespect for the written word calls directly to mind the white supremacists who burned Jewish books in Nazi Germany.
What are you doing about racism? As many African-Americans predicted to me, if you complain about it then people really attack you.
Meanwhile, every day the forces of....not good get bigger and stronger, and the public more tribally divided by various forms of media, skilfully herded around like hypnotized sheep.
"All the other fateful means resorted to over the last century of Russia’s bitter history are even less fitting for us today—true, let’s not fall back on them! Today, when all the axes have hewn what they hacked, when all that was sown has borne fruit, we can see how lost, how drugged were those conceited youths who sought, through terror, bloody uprising, and civil war, to make the country just and content. No thank you, fathers of enlightenment! We now know that the vileness of the means begets the vileness of the result. Let our hands be clean!"
I would argue that many of the things that get categorised as Truth or Lie are actually not so easy to distinguish as we might hope. We do not enjoy a world of clear, mathematically-precise binary choices, but instead have to deal with things like opinions, parts of facts, unknowns, and complex systems whose outcomes have multiple causes.
There are many things which I see paraded as absolute certainties where I myself reserve some room for doubt, even where I may mostly agree.
I feel the larger issue facing us is not a torrent of absolute lies, but an overconfidence in discerning the lie, and a retreat from humility, nuance, and reasonableness (which is not the same as rationality).
People like the propaganda. It's heavily optimized, it works for them, and they'll even subscribe to its patreon.
This comment looks ironic under the link to one of the most famous propagandist and liar in human history.
Solzhenitsyn's books are full of lies that were debunked thousands of times. Most of the numbers in his books were written for him by the CIA curators. He never had access to any documents that he could cite as a source, so he just copied the numbers from cheat sheets provided for him by CIA.
There're other numerous non-fitments in his books.
He was a weapon of American propaganda against USSR. He collaborated with CIA. It's ironic and pitiful that he's still referred to as some kind of truth-seeker.
Because the true preferences of members in a society can be effectively hidden for extended periods, and members all have their own threshold where they may feel compelled to reveal a preference, there is no sure way to foretell the dynamics of a revolution.
I'm not speaking in favour of lying as a conscious life choice all the time, just that it may well be a thought pattern deep in the self-aware mind.
Dogs misdirecting where the best food is. Birds walking away from the nest with a fake broken wing..
Yes, Altruistic and social status truth-seeking actions are in the model too: sharing food equitably, waiting for the leader to take the choice morsel of food. Just sometimes, the choice morsel is the one you let them see, sitting on the one you will eat later.
His point is that if you live a repressive society where you must lie to survive or to get ahead, and where taking a stand will achieve nothing other than destroy yourself, at the very least don't lie to yourself, to quote the piece: say plainly "I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill."
Now obviously he intended this in part as a snide remark, and he would have hoped people would do more than this, but also I think it was getting to the crux of his point that this is still better.
But I agree with the sentiment overall. Nobody should wind up in the dock like Zinoviev or Kamenev copping a plea "for the good of the party"
https://archive.org/details/SolzhenitsynAleksandrIsaevichFro...
Because many sucsessful people, especially in tough economic situation use lying as a tool, and it seems to work.
Heck the fields of marketing and sales often use some forms of lying.
Yes, there's a price, but there's also a familt to feed.