An interesting perspective from a dissident imprisoned in the days of communist rule in Czechoslovakia -
"In recent years I've met several intelligent and decent people who were very clearly and to my mind, very tragically, marked by their fate: they became bitter, misanthropic world haters who lost faith in everything. Quite separately, they managed to persuade themselves that people are selfish, evil and untrustworthy, that it makes no sense to help anyone, to try to achieve anything or to rectify anything, that all moral principles, higher aims and suprapersonal ideals are naively utopian and that one must accept the world 'as it is' - which is to say unalterably bad - and behave accordingly. And that means looking out for no one but oneself and living the rest of one's life as quietly and inconspicuously as possible.
"....Resignation, like faith, can be deliberate or unpremeditated. If it is deliberate, then the tinge of bad conscience that customarily clings to it requires it to be justified and defended extensively (before whom? why?) by referring to the evil of the world and the incorrigibility of that evil. The important thing to note here, of course, is that it was not the evil of the world that ultimately led the person to give up, but rather his own resignation that led him to the theory about the evil of the world. However 'unbelievers' may deny it, the existential choice always comes first, and only then is followed by the dead-end, pessimistic picture of the world that is meant to justify that choice.... To put it even less charitably: 'unbelievers' insist on the incorrigible evil of the world so obstinately chiefly to justify committing some of those evils themselves. (Notice that whenever someone starts carrying on about how corrupt everything around him is, it is usually a clear signal that he is preparing to do something rather nasty himself.)"
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
No comments:
Post a Comment