Quote:In the real world, love and compassion - even from parents - is not assured.
Hence we need governments to fill the breach.
Could there be something beyond the survival instinct and the quest for happiness? “Poverty and prison . . . give wisdom,” we hear, but what is that wisdom? Not just Solzhenitsyn, but also many others asked this question. This collective autobiography guides us through their answers.
“Here is how it was with many others, not just with me,” Solzhenitsyn explains. One’s first prison experience resembles the sky over Pompeii or the heaven of the Last Judgment “because it was not just anyone who had been arrested, but I—the center of this world.” One thought occurs to everyone: one must vow to survive at any price. And one soon realizes what that means: “at the price of someone else.”
And whoever takes that vow . . . allows his own misfortune to overshadow both the entire common misfortune and the whole world.
This is the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the other will descend. If you go to the right—you lose your life, and if you go the left—you lose your conscience.
Solzhenitsyn concedes that at that fork, “at that greater divider of souls,” most choose survival. Intellectuals—resembling many of his Western readers—usually acted swinishly because they could always find a way to justify anything.
One could also expect the worst from those who “accept that pitiful ideology which holds that ‘human beings are created for happiness.’” That, of course, is what most secular Americans take for granted. Reading this book, they are likely to ask: what else could life be about if not individual happiness? Exiled to the West, Solzhenitsyn shocked educated people by criticizing the shallowness of such thinking. Life is not just about oneself, he insisted, and one can expect arrogant bosh from those who think it is. They often responded by dismissing him as a religious fanatic.
Although most prisoners chose survival, many chose conscience, and Solzhenitsyn describes a few he met.
They all knew that, according to official Bolshevik atheism, there are no transcendent values. Lenin and his followers scorned such ideas as “human dignity” and the “sanctity of human life.” No, Soviet citizens were taught, only the material result counted, and that meant the only moral standard was the interest of the Communist Party. People who accepted this way of thinking readily concluded that, on the individual level, too, all that matters is what promotes one’s own welfare.
Choosing conscience meant rejecting such thinking. You gradually recognize that “It is not the result that counts . . . but the spirit! Not what—but how.”
https://newcriterion.com/article/the-masterpiece-of-our-time/
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This Aboriginal Disaster (Read 5172 times)
