Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → ethics → Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on this and that

Not To Live By Falsehood
 — Alexander Solzhenitsyn, c.

There was a time when we didn’t even dare to whisper. Now we write and read Samizdat, and at gatherings complain to each other: What tricks they resort to… where are they leading us? All this boasting and bragging about cosmic flights, when homes are destitute and impoverished; the support of boisterous regimes in far away places; provoking civil wars, and senselessly bringing up Mao Tse-tung, preparing us to be sent against him. And the people would doubtless go — how could one escape? Meanwhile they bring to trial whomever they wish, and the sane are forced into mental hospitals. All this is done by them… and we… we are powerless.…

Affairs have almost reached the bottom. Threat of spiritual perdition (ruin) hangs over our heads, while the physical consequences could flare up and burn us and our children. But we, as before, cravenly smile, mumble and lisp: How can we prevent it? We have no power.

We are so hopelessly dehumanized that to keep our place at today’s modest trough we are willing to give up all principles, even our soul, wasting all the travails of our forefathers, ignoring the possibilities for our posterity. Gone is firmness, pride, and warmth of heart. We are hardly frightened by all-encompassing atomic death, supposing, if a third world war comes, that we can hide in some crevice. All that we fear is to act courageously! The fate we dread most is to be separated from the herd, to have to make a step alone, suddenly to be ostracized… isolated.

We are indoctrinated by political propaganda, dinning into us that this way it is easier to live. No one, they say, can escape social conditions: existence determines consciousness, so what can you do? Nothing.

Yet we could do everything! We lie to ourselves to calm our conscience. No one else is to be blamed. Only ourselves. Only we!

It might be objected: What alternatives are there? Our mouths are riveted shut; no one hears us, no one asks anything. How can we make people hear? Change their minds? It is impossible.

Why didn’t we elect other leaders? There are no elections in our country. In the West people know about strikes, protests, demonstrations — but we are so intimidated that such action horrifies us: Who, all of a sudden, could refuse to work, or dare to make open protest on the street? These and other fatal methods were tried in the last century — look at the bitter history of Russia!

Indeed, these things are not for us; in truth, we must not attempt them. Now, when we have hewn our way to the end, when all the seed that was sown has sprouted, we see how lost, how dazed and presumptuous were those who thought that by terror, bloody uprisings and civil war they could make our country just and happy. No, we turn away from those fathers of “enlightenment!” We know, now, that heinous means breed heinous results. Our hands must be clean!

The circle is closed! There is no escape. Left for us is passive waiting, as if, suddenly, something might happen by itself!

Never will these bonds loosen by themselves. Never, while all of us continue every day to affirm them, praise and strengthen them. The knot which ties them remains secure unless we attack its most sensitive point, which is Falsehood.

When violence invades the peaceful life of the people, it proclaims: “I am Violence! Disperse, give way — or I’ll crush you!” But violence soon succumbs to time. After a few years it’s not so sure of itself, and to gain respectability, to be thought decent, violence always calls on falsehood for an ally. Violence cannot hide its ugliness except in falsehood, and falsehood can be upheld only by violence. Moreover, in order to survive, violence must be selective. Not every day, and not on every shoulder, does violence put its heavy paw. It works best by threat, demanding that we be obedient to falsehood, participate daily in falsehood — this is the allegiance it demands. Yet here, though neglected by us, is the simplest, most available key to our freedom: personal nonparticipation in falsehood! While falsehood may cover everything and own everything, the single individual still can stand alone. He can say: Falsehood may rule, but not through me!

And this is a break in the circle of our inactivity. Because, when people turn away from falsehood it simply ceases to be. As an infection, falsehood can exist only in people.

We are not called — indeed, we may lack the strength — to go out in public squares and proclaim the truth, express openly our thoughts. But a way is still open to us, even in our ingrown condition of cowardice — a way easier than Gandhi’s civil disobedience.

It is not to uphold falsehood consciously in anything. Where one sees the beginning of falsehood — each in his own way — he will not cross the line into its gangrenous territory. Having made this resolve, we would perhaps be astounded to see how suddenly falsehood dies, so that what lies behind stands naked before the world.

Let each one choose: Will he continue to be a servant of falsehood (not from any inclination to falsehood, but only for feeding his family, for bringing up his children, in the spirit of falsehood), or has the time come for him to change, to become worthy of the respect of his children and his contemporaries? If the time has come, from that day on:

  • he will not write, sign, or publish any phrase, which, as he understands it, distorts truth. He will not express such a phrase either in private conversation, or publicly, or by order, or in the role of agitator, teacher, tutor, or in a theatrical role.
  • he will not, either in painting, sculpture, photography, technically, or musically, portray or express one false thought, one distortion of truth as he understands it.
  • he will not cite, either orally or in writing, one “leading” idea so as to curry favor, so as to be safe, so as to be successful in his field of work, unless he completely agrees with the thought he cites, and it exactly fits the case.
  • he will not be coerced to attend a demonstration or a meeting if this is against his desire and will. He will not carry in his hands a banner with a slogan the meaning of which he doesn’t completely share; he will not lift his voter’s hand to endorse a motion with which in all honesty he is not in accord; he will not cast his ballot, either publicly or secretly, for a person he deems to be unworthy of trust.
  • he will not let himself be forced to attend a meeting which will permit only a deliberately biased discussion of a question; he will immediately leave a session, meeting, lecture, play or a film showing, as soon as he hears the speaker repeat falsehood, ideological nonsense, or brazen propaganda.
  • he will not subscribe, buy, or accept newspapers or journals carrying distorted information, in which meaningful facts are withheld.

We have enumerated only a few of the possible and necessary ways of avoiding falsehood. He who begins to purify himself will soon be able to identify other means. At first, to be sure, the changed practice will be uneven. One may lose his job. The young person who wants to be honest will find his life complicated at the beginning. Even lessons in school are crammed with falsehood, and he will have to choose. Indeed, for young or old, there is no escape from decision — there is not a day for any one of us, even in the most safely remote technical sciences, when we can avoid the choice of either truth or falsehood; of either spiritual autonomy or spiritual servitude. The one who lacks courage even to defend his soul — let him not be proud of his enlightened views, or that he is an “academician,” a people’s artist, a much admired “activist,” or a dauntless general. Let him say to himself, instead: I am a nonentity, a coward, who puts personal security before truth.

Even this path of personal integrity — the most moderate means of resistance — will be for us, who are so timorous, so conditioned, not easy. Yet it is far easier than self-immolation or hunger strikes: the flames will not encompass the body, the eyes will not burst from the heat, and black bread with clean water may still be found for one’s family.

A great people of Europe — the people of Czechoslovakia — deceived and betrayed by us: Have they not shown how the uncovered breast may stand up even against tanks, when in the breast beats a deserving heart! It may not be an easy choice for the body — but it is the only one for the soul. Not an easy path — yet there are people amongst us, even tens of them, who have through many years endured while following this path — while living by truth.

One may not be the first to step on this path, but one can join! Each one who joins makes the path easier, and much shorter for all the rest. When there are thousands who take this way, it will be impossible to overcome each one. And were there tens of thousands — then, we would not recognize our country, so great would be the change!

But if we lack courage, then let us at least stop complaining that we cannot breathe. For it is we, ourselves, who refuse to breathe! So in that case we may kneel even lower and wait until our brothers in the department of biology arrange to bring closer the day when all our thoughts are read and inspected, and our genes have proper supervision.

It was to such that Pushkin cried—

What need have herds for the gift of freedom?…
Their heritage — passed on from generation to generation —
Is the yoke with rattles and the whip.

Some time after I heard that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had died, I pulled The Gulag Archipelago from the shelves and found that I’d left some bookmarks in it.

I’ve only read that and One Day in the Life…, so that’s how I judge A.S. Most of the obituaries and tributes I’ve read lately are half-apologetic, dwelling on Solzhenitsyn’s retrograde nationalism and alleged anti-semitism. I can’t say anything on those points, having only read a few of his works. The ones I read, however, impressed me.

These are some of the bits I flagged as I was reading The Gulag Archipelago. First, on the arrest:

Why, then, should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all, you’ll only make your situation worse; you’ll make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake. And it isn’t just that you don’t put up any resistance; you even walk down the stairs on tiptoe, as you are ordered to do, so your neighbors won’t hear.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood that they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

If… If… We didn’t love freedom enough.

On the mysterious prickings of conscience:

Our feelings could not be put into words — and even if we had found the words, fear would have prevented our speaking them aloud to one another. It was not our minds that resisted but something inside our breasts. People can shout at you from all sides: “You must!” And your own head can be saying also: “You must!” But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.

On where evil lies:

[L]et the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now.

If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

On victory and defeat:

There is a simple truth which one can learn only through suffering: in war not victories are blessed but defeats. Governments need victories and the people need defeats. Victory gives rise to the desire for more victories. But after a defeat it is freedom that men desire — and usually attain. A people needs defeat just as an individual needs suffering and misfortune: they compel the deepening of the inner life and generate a spiritual upsurge.

On law:

For several centuries we had a proverb: “Don’t fear the law, fear the judge.”

But in my opinion, the law has outstripped people, and people have lagged behind in cruelty. It is time to reverse the proverb: “Don’t fear the judge, fear the law.”

On responsibility:

Vlasov spoke… in a fast retort: “For myself, I’ve decided one thing only. I’m going to tell the executioner: ‘You alone, not the judges, not the prosecutors, you alone are guilty of my death, and you are going to have to live with it! If it weren’t for you willing executioners, there would be no death sentences!’ So then let him kill me, the rat!”

On the withdrawal of consent:

The weakening and shaking up of the Tsarist prison system did not come about on its own, of course, but because all society, in concert with the revolutionaries, was shaking it up and ridiculing it in every possible way. Tsarism lost its chance to survive not in the street skirmishes of February but several decades earlier, when youths from well-to-do families began to consider a prison term an honor; when army officers (even guard officers) began to regard it as dishonorable to shake the hand of a gendarme. And the more the prison system weakened, the more clearly evident were the triumphant ethics of the political prisoners, and the more visibly did the members of the revolutionary parties realize their strength and regard their own laws as superior to those of the state.

On valor:

After all, we have gotten used to regarding as valor only valor in war (or the kind that’s needed for flying in outer space), the kind which jingle-jangles with medals. We have forgotten another concept of valor — civil valor. And that’s all our society needs, just that, just that, just that! That’s all we need and that’s exactly what we haven’t got.

, I wrote about the mixture of coercion, persuasion, and authority that establish a governed people. My thinking was that a state is established and defended by some combination of active coercion and persuasion, but that a mature state may maintain itself mostly through authority, which I described as being something like momentum or as “a mixture of coercion and persuasion that is held in reserve: an energy that is potential, rather than kinetic — like a battery.”

I was reminded of this recently while reading “Live Not by Lies!” — Alexandr Sol­zhe­ni­tsyn’s farewell message to Russians as he was exiled from the Soviet Union in .

In this brief message, Sol­zhe­ni­tsyn advocates a single, fundamental form of civil disobedience: declining, passively, to help maintain the web of lies that the Soviet state relied on and that Sol­zhe­ni­tsyn identified as the regime’s “most vulnerable point.” He wrote:

When violence bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with self-assurance, it displays on its banner and proclaims: “I am violence! Make way, step aside, I will crush you!” But violence ages swiftly, a few years pass — and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally — Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit — and this suffices as our fealty.

And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!

This seemed to me to be a parallel way of explaining the same sort of evolution, with political authority explained as being a variety of lie that is popularly maintained and nests along with violent coercion.

I’ve been skimming The Sol­zhe­ni­tsyn Reader, but it’s not growing on me much yet. I skipped ahead to some of his later essays & speeches and I see how he came to be thought of as kind of an annoying crank. He chastizes “the West” for our “intolerable music” and our television and our refusal to buckle down and defeat the Vietnamese and our un­will­ing­ness to ban Monty Python’s blasphemous Life of Brian. Modern art is self-indulgent, journalists pry into private affairs and reveal state secrets with impunity, God is mocked and ignored, people’s whimsical fancies are the closest thing to a lodestone in their lives, and… you kids get off my lawn!

I’m still reading through The Solzhenitsyn Reader and found another excerpt I thought was worth sharing here. This comes from part four of The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn is reflecting that for some people, including himself, the torturous exile to the archipelago could “transform your former character in an astonishing way”:

Looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I had not understood either myself or my strivings. What had seemed for so long to be beneficial now turned out in actuality to be fatal, and I had been striving to go in the opposite direction to that which was truly necessary to me. But just as the waves of the sea knock the inexperienced swimmer off his feet and keep tossing him back onto the shore, so also was I painfully tossed back on dry land by the blows of misfortune. And it was only because of this that I was able to travel the path which I had always really wanted to travel.

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.

As hard as it is for a skeptic like me to admit it, to the extent I see hope for the future I see it in the form of something akin to a religious revival. Expecting meaningful reform (or abolition) of governments and states in isolation from the reform of the people who maintain these governments and states is hopeless, and revolution has exactly the same problem but with the additional handicap of being bloody and traumatic.

Trouble is, it’s easy to find examples of religious revivals gone haywire, and it’s easy to imagine even promising examples going off the rails. Would I care to join a Cromwell or Khomeini (or a secularish American equivalent) in toppling the corrupt order on a popular wave of religious awakening?

Let me serve you up another slice of Solzhenitsyn.

The Red Wheel is a set of books that are meant to capture the story of the emergence of the Soviet Union from the collapse of the Tsarist order. In these books, Solzhenitsyn uses a variety of techniques to tell the story from many angles. It’s a project that he first conceived of when he was still a communist true believer in the mid-1930s. Over time it grew increasingly ambitious and, of course, changed its focus as he came to see the Russian revolutions as the central global tragedy of his time. Some of the work has yet to be translated into English.

This selection is an excerpt from chapter six of . Second Lieutenant Sanya Lazhenitsyn has become guilt-ridden about his participation in war and has come to see a military chaplain, Father Severyan. He had been to see him once before and had received absolution, but this hadn’t eased his mind:

“…you gave me absolution for my sin and my doubts — but I hadn’t absolved myself. It all came back to plague me again. Should I have gone back to you? A second and a third time? To repeat what I’d already said, in the very same words — as if I was rejecting the absolution you’d given me? And even if you didn’t reproach me, what could you do? Only repeat: ‘I, an unworthy priest, by the authority given to me by God…’ And I would be answering back, as you covered my head with your robe: ‘No, don’t forgive me, it won’t help!’ In confession there’s no avoiding it: you have to pardon me in the end.”

The chaplain hears him out, but suggests that the problem isn’t sin or forgiveness or absolution but Lazhenitsyn’s erroneously quasi-pacifist idea of Christianity. Lazhenitsyn pushes the point:

“…the way I look at it, Father Severyan, since we’re in the same brigade and your job is to contribute to the success of Russian arms, there’s little comfort you can give to me. You are too involved in it all, and — forgive me for saying so — may be sinning yourself. You distribute amulets, and make sure every last man has one around his neck. You carry the cross along the trenches before an attack, and sprinkle the men with holy water. Or you take an icon around the dugouts for tomorrow’s corpses to kiss. Priests have been known, when there are no officers left, to jump at the chance of relaying their regimental commander’s battle orders. But the most dreadful thing of all is when a service is held in the field, and the candles are placed on pyramids of four rifles leaning together.”

Severyan responds that he volunteered to join the military in battle — “I actually thought that this was the more natural place for me to be in time of war” because for a priest "[l]ife as it is must be our field of action.” He then goes on to make a strange, back-handed defense of war:

“At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church — none of them has been able to stop it. And don’t succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state’s essential functions.” Father Severyan’s enunciation was very precise. “War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from violence.”

To me this speech is most remarkable for how it autodigests, contradicting itself and dissolving its own arguments. The editors of The Solzhenitsyn Reader take it at face value, summarizing Severyan’s argument (as Solzhenitsyn’s argument) in their introduction as: “The state, for all its limitations, is an indispensable precondition of the common good, a necessary instrument for avoiding the evils that flow from imperfect human nature.”

But try to form syllogisms from the statements in this speech: War is the price we pay for living in a state, and the state was created to protect us from violence. No state can live without war, and you will be astonished to learn that none of our political leaders have been able to prevent war. Rational and just wars cannot be sorted out from the rest, and once they have been sorted out millions of people will find them to be senseless and unjustified anyway.

Severyan goes on, “[keeping] his mind fixed on the same thought, resisting any temptation to digress”:

“In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses — but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction — and that is war. So then, the dilemma of peace versus war is a superficial dilemma for superficial minds. ‘We have only to stop making war and we shall have peace.’ No! The Christian prayer says ‘peace on earth and goodwill among men.’ That is when true peace will arrive: when there is goodwill among men. Otherwise even without war men will go on strangling, poisoning, starving, stabbing, and burning each other, trampling each other underfoot and spitting in each other’s faces.”

The argument continues to eat itself here. The fallen world is full of people acting cruelly, lashing out in chaotic spasms of impulsive evil. “The state is called upon to check these impulses” but instead creates others, “still more powerful,” and focuses them like a magnifying glass focuses the sun’s rays, “and that is war.”

“War is not the vilest form of evil, not the most evil of evils. An unjust trial, for instance, that scalds the outraged heart, is viler. Or murder for gain, when the solitary murderer fully understands the implications of what he means to do and all that the victim will suffer at the moment of the crime. Or the ordeal at the hands of a torturer. When you can neither cry out nor fight back nor attempt to defend yourself. Or treachery on the part of someone you trusted. Or mistreatment of widows and orphans. All these things are spiritually dirtier and more terrible than war.”

Lezhenitsyn, though eager to hear some good-sounding story like this that will ease his conscience, can’t help but notice that in war you have injustice, murder, torture, treachery, and mistreatment of widows and orphans in “the most wholesale form.” But Severyan responds — allegedly defending war and the state, mind you — by saying those individual evils he enumerated only seem lesser than the evils of war…

“…There are just as many of them. Only they are not assembled in one place in one short period of time, like those killed in war. Think of the great tyrants — Ivan the Terrible, Biron, Peter. Or — yes — the reprisals against the Old Believers. No need for war there — they were effectively suppressed without it. Over the years, and counting all countries, the sum of suffering is no less without war than with it. It may even be greater.”

This begins to work: Well, if the evil the state commits in war is just a more obvious version of the evil the state commits on a larger scale outside of war (thinks Lezhenitsyn) then maybe I shouldn’t be so upset about my participation in it.

Lazhenitsyn was livening up. Brightening. And the priest spoke with even greater ease…

“The real dilemma is the choice between peace and evil. War is only a special case of evil, concentrated in time and space. Whoever rejects war without first rejecting the state is a hypocrite. And whoever fails to see that there is something more primitive and more dangerous than war — and that is the universal evil instilled into men’s hearts — sees only the surface. Mankind’s true dilemma is the choice between peace in the heart and evil in the heart. The evil of worldliness. And the way to overcome this worldliness is not by antiwar demonstrations, processions along the streets with signs bearing slogans. We have been granted not just one generation, not just an age, not just an epoch, to overcome it, but the whole of history from Adam to the Second Coming.…”

Lazhenitsyn has one more brief spasm of doubt: “Does any of this make murder in battle more forgivable than murder with malice aforethought? Or murder by a torturer, or a tyrant.” Setting the bar high, he nonetheless leaves himself a possible escape: “It’s just that here we have a ritual, it’s made to look like a matter of routine — ‘everybody else is doing it, I can’t be the odd man out’ — and this ritual deludes us. Gives us a false reassurance.”

Nothing false about it, says Severyan: “Yes, but if you think about it, a ritual has to have some sort of basis in reality. … War… creates comradely union, it calls on us to sacrifice ourselves… Say what you like, war is not the greatest of evils.”

Not the greatest of evils, almost certainly more forgivable than murder with malice aforethought or murder by a torturer or tyrant. With that ringing endorsement, Lazhenitsyn turns: “What you say… comes as a surprise to me. I hadn’t thought enough about it. It’s a great relief. But everybody should be told about these things. Nobody knows about them.” He then <symbolism class="Christian">opens the stove and stirs the coals</symbolism>.

I think the editors are being naïve when they say that this can be best read as “the sympathetically drawn cleric [giving] voice to a Christian wisdom that affirms that war, especially in defense of state and nation, ‘is not the vilest form of evil.’ ”

I finished up The Solzhenitsyn Reader a couple of days back. Here are some more excerpts and some thoughts that came to mind during my reading.

First, this bit from The Gulag Archepelago, in which he discusses the reluctance of the victims, perpetrators, and collaborators in the Soviet Union to try to come to some sort of accounting for what took place.

Yes, so-and-so many millions did get mowed down — but no one was to blame for it. And if someone pipes up: “What about those who…” the answer comes from all sides, reproachfully and amicably at first: “What are you talking about, comrade! Why open old wounds?”

I thought of this chapter when I read that Spain may shame the United States further by prosecuting our torturers and war criminals for us.

Solzhenitsyn again:

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. … Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity. ¶ It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!

As long as the torturers and war criminals at loose in the United States enjoy their legal and moral immunity, the torture policy of the United States remains intact. Obama issued an executive order banning torture, but doesn’t anyone remember that even Dubya did that? The policy of the United States is that the government may torture its prisoners if the president says so, laws and treaties be damned, and its torturers will enjoy effective immunity and its victims will have no recourse to justice. That policy is still fully in effect as far as I can see.

Of course, I don’t put my hope in Obama or The Law to put things right. But is it too much to ask that someone like John Yoo be shunned as the repulsive moral cretin he is? Do we have to leave it to Spain to call him the accused while we continue to call him “professor” and pretend this is all just a difference of opinion?

I think maybe I’m a patriot in spite of myself, considering how badly I feel at how shamefully the United States is acting. If I didn’t have a little patriotism lurking in my heart it wouldn’t bother me so much that the U.S. doesn’t have the moral fortitude to cast its torturers and war criminals out of respectable society.

When Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event he hadn’t allowed himself to hope would happen in his lifetime, he found a nation wrecked — “crushed beneath the rubble” of the collapsing communist behemoth.

People had great hopes for the change of regime, but by the time Solzhenitsyn returned their hopes had been dashed as kleptocratic remnants of the old regime stayed on in new clothes to make themselves rich at public expense. People told him:

  • “The common man is being robbed.”
  • “I don’t believe anything these authorities say.”
  • “Whoever works honestly has no future in life anymore.”
  • “Will we live to see the day when science is valued more than making a buck?”
  • “Kids in school go faint from hunger.”
  • “I set money aside, saved it all my life, and now they’ve turned it into nothing. What did they rob me for?”
  • “How many times have we been deceived already?”
  • “Legalized bandits occupy our highest levels of power.”
  • “If I should fall ill, I have no money for getting better.”
  • “We now are ruled by an ideology of seizing and envy.”
  • “The government has taken up pillaging.”
  • “Not a single official comes before a court.”
  • “The democrats turned out to be the biggest bribe-takers of all.”

Solzhenitsyn put some thought into coming up with a plan for saving Russia. His advice was for Russians to come together and work on local solutions and create their own grass-roots, small-scale political infrastructure, independently of the state:

People’s real everyday life, four-fifths of it or more, depends not on the events taking place on the national level, but on local events, and therefore on local self-government that directs the course of life in a small district. This is exactly how life is regulated in the nations of the West: through effective local self-government, where each has the opportunity to participate in the decisions that most directly affect his existence. Only this type of arrangement can be called a democracy.

Now you’re probably thinking “where exactly in the nations of the West is life regulated in this way?” Here in the U.S., public policy is mostly established by cabals of politicians and industry interest groups without anything like “each [having] the opportunity to participate in the decisions that most directly affect his existence.”

When Solzhenitsyn was exiled in the United States, he stayed in Cavendish, Vermont. Vermont is among the New England states that periodically use the very democratic town meeting to decide some political questions. He attended town meetings and was impressed by the institution, which probably gave a romantic glow to his general impression of democracy in America and “the nations of the West.”

When he left Vermont, he said that there, “I have observed the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities” (he added, “unfortunately, we do not have this in Russia, and that is still our greatest shortcoming.”)

And when he returned to Russia, he carried that message there:

Our State Duma, in both its sessions, one as indifferent as the other, put the brakes on any substantive legislation enabling local self-government, refusing to vest it with real authority and an independent financial base.

But even if no one will open the gates to local self-government, it is still in the vital interest of the people to act! Let all who have not yet lost their resolve act on their own, without waiting for the blessing of an enabling statute out of the calicified Center, which may yet take a long time before it awakens. Much already is not functioning in today’s Russia, and we must not let the rest of it stall.

We should begin with patient decision-making about specific local problems, coming together to address each and every issue that arises affecting the community: physical, professional, cultural, social. We should come together in active civic, professional, and cultural groups. In whatever place, and in however small a number, we must work on every short-term and every long-term task. Every such association, in form and substance, bridges the void of our ill, indifferent times.

He’s calling for people to create their own parallel, voluntaryist, local institutions to take the place of the government — rather than waiting in vain for the national government to reconstitute itself and exert authority. Remarkable stuff from someone who’s usually caricatured as a reactionary nationalist.

Every time that there forms a little center, a link in a chain, an initiative — whether around culture, education, child-rearing, a particular profession, local history, the environment, community planning, even just gardening — such groups are the seedlings of local self-government, and may even become component parts in its future structure. It is for them to form in a common endeavor, and to begin to guide local life — with wisdom, toward its preservation, and not into a dead end, where many a boss and many a Decree has led us. At the outset, it may be necessary to come together even before the law permits real and meaningful elections of local government.

Some will complain: But we do not know how. Our people have weak awareness of their rights. However, the calamities that have befallen the people are actively sharpening such awareness. It will gain strength through the very process of fighting for popular self-government. Besides, one cannot create the finished product all at once, but only by stepwise approximations, through constant attempts.

This all seems like sensible advice to me, not just for post-collapse Russia, but for any country whose corrupt kleptocrats have lost the respect of its citizens.

As I mentioned , I tried to flesh out a variety of political philosophy that I whimsically dubbed “topianism.”

I meant the name to highlight the distinction between it and utopian political philosophies (meaning, most all of the rest of them, including the mainstream ones that pass for conventional wisdom) — that is to say that it’s not aiming at organizing society in some ideal way, but in understanding and navigating society as it is in the here-and-now (not in the outopos where it will never be, or the eutopos where we might ideally project it to be, but in this topos right here where we’re standing). I’m not crazy about the name “topianism,” but I need some sort of tag to attach to the idea while I look for a better one.

Topianism is almost more of an ethical code than a political philosophy, except that it has a component with profound political consequences: its claim that there is no second standard (or set of standards) by which to judge acts in the political sphere — instead, a single standard applies to everyone. Questions like “is she a citizen?” or “is he a defendant?” or “is she the queen?” or “is he licensed?” or “is that legal?” don’t play the same sort of decisive role in topian evaluation as they do in utopian philosophies.

Topianism bears a lot of resemblance to existentialism because of its emphasis on personal responsibility and on avoiding the temptation to deflect or deny this responsibility.

When you talk about responsibility, you sometimes end up getting into the tangle over free will. There’s a lot of philosophical debate over whether free will makes any sense at all, and if it does, how it must be structured so as to make sense and whether a free will so structured bears any resemblance to the more intuitive, common-sense version of the concept. And there’s a lot of psychological debate over the extent to which our conscious decision-making is actually a causal factor in our actions or is only an after-the-fact “just so story” we tell ourselves.

Be all that as it may, most of us feel that we inhabit a world in which we choose some actions and some things just happen to us and in which there is a big difference between the two. This is crucial to our sense of being living participants in existence and not just spectators along for the ride.

The existentialist tradition did a lot of work identifying some of the ways we conveniently pretend to be spectators instead of participants from time to time in order to try to cheat our way out of confronting our need to decide and our responsibility for the results of our decision-making.

Topianism emphasizes how this works (or rather doesn’t work) in the political sphere. It insists that you cannot displace an individual human decision onto an institution, a hierarchical order, a rule, or anything of the sort. In other words, you cannot say “I did it because it was the law,” or “I did it because it was my job,” or “I did it because it was an order,” or “I did it because it got more votes than the alternative” as a way of trying to mean “the choice I made to do it wasn’t really my choice.”

In its most uncompromising form, topianism won’t even let you foist your decisions off on rules of thumb, ethical principles, or topianism itself. You can refer to such things in the course of explaining your decision-making, but you can’t try to make such things bear any of the weight of your actual decision-making or shoulder any of the responsibility for your actions.

It is an anarchist philosophy, but not because it preaches that The State should be abolished, but because it asserts that The State, as an independent moral agent capable of making decisions and shouldering responsibility, does not exist. The attitude of a topian to The State is not like the attitude of an assassin to the Emperor but like the attitude of an atheist to God.

Topianism does not mandate pacifism, or the nonaggression principle, or aversion to coercion (though some, like Tolstoy in the quotes below and in what I quoted , blend the two ideas or find that they both derive from a common root). Indeed if it were to mandate such a thing, it would be self-undermining, as its practitioners would be pacifists or nonaggressive or noncoercive because of a rule rather than because of their choice.

A topian can throw a man in prison, but only by saying “it’s because I think they should be confined and I’m willing to take responsibility for confining them,” and not “I’m following the law and what the warrant says.” A topian can steal from his neighbor, but only by saying “I want his property and don’t respect his ownership of it,” never by saying “I have a legal seizure order” or “to each according to his need.” Topian decisions can be wise or unwise, good or bad, praiseworthy or blameworthy. The one thing they cannot be is foisted off on someone or something other than the person actually deciding.

A topian can never merely follow an order because it is an order or because the person who gave it holds a rank or position. But a topian may conclude that some other person has a better track record of wisdom and good judgment in some field and may follow his or her advice for that reason — though never losing track of the fact that the choice and the responsibility for the consequences lie with the person taking the advice, not the person giving it.

This may sound slippery, since it seems easy to just linguistically transform an improper delegation of responsibility into a reasonable one just by saying “I choose it.” Is there a meaningful difference between saying “I did it because of an order from my commander” and saying “I did it because I chose to follow the advice of that commander-guy who seemed to me to be well-informed and of good judgment”?

I think there is. In the latter case, you have to at least ostensibly own the responsibility for your choice and make a more-or-less honest claim of having thought it over and justified it — furthermore, your posture is obviously conditional on the good judgment of “that commander-guy” and not just an unconditional carte blanche of obedience. In the former case, none of that is true: you’re merely a tool in your commander’s hands. That said, it’s certainly possible to describe your decision in a way that formally looks proper but is really a dishonest dodge gussied up in the right package. You can’t just change your language in a “politically correct” fashion, you really do have to honestly change your attitude.

Here are some ways I’ve seen the topian creed, or something close to it, expressed:

Juanita Nelson:
“It is, as far as I can see, an unpleasant fact that we cannot avoid decision-making. We are not absolved by following the dictates of a mentor or of a majority. For we then have made the decision to do that — have concluded because of belief or of fear or of apathy that this is the thing which we should do or cannot avoid doing. And then we share in the consequences of any such action. Are we doing more than trying to hide our nakedness with a fig leaf when we take the view expressed by a friend who belonged to a fundamental religious sect? At the time he wore the uniform of the United States Marines. ‘I’m not helping to murder,’ he said. ‘I’m carrying out the orders of my government, and the sin is not mine.’ I could never tell whether there was a bitter smile playing around his lips or if he was quite earnest. It is a rationalization commonly held and defended. It is a comforting presumption, but it still appears to me that, while the seat of government is in Washington, the seat of conscience is in me. It cannot be voted out of office by one or a million others.”
“Bernardo de la Paz” in Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress:
“A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame… as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else.”
Mary McCarthy:
“If somebody points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempting you, that is all.”
Hannah Arendt:
“[T]here is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters. The only domain where the word could possibly apply to adults who are not slaves is the domain of religion, in which people say that they obey the word or the command of God because the relationship between God and man can rightly be seen in terms similar to the relation between adult and child. ¶ Hence the question addressed to those who participated and obeyed orders should never be, ‘Why did you obey?’ but ‘Why did you support?’ … Much would be gained if we could eliminate this pernicious word ‘obedience’ from our vocabulary of moral and political thought. If we think these matters through, we might regain some measure of self-confidence and even pride, that is, regain what former times called the dignity or the honor of man: not perhaps of mankind but of the status of being human.”
Vlasov, in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago:
“For myself, I’ve decided one thing only. I’m going to tell the executioner: ‘You alone, not the judges, not the prosecutors, you alone are guilty of my death, and you are going to have to live with it! If it weren’t for you willing executioners, there would be no death sentences!’ So then let him kill me, the rat!”
Tolstoy:
“The men of our time complain of the evil current of life in our Christian world. This cannot be otherwise, when in our consciousness we have recognized not only the fundamental divine commandment, ‘Do not kill,’ which was proclaimed thousands of years ago, but also the law of the love and brotherhood of all men, and when, in spite of this, every man of our European world in reality renounces this fundamental divine law, which he recognizes, and at the command of a president, emperor, minister, a Nicholas, a William, puts on a fool’s costume, takes up instruments of murder, and says, ‘I am ready, — I will strike down, ruin, and kill whomsoever you command me to.’ ¶ What, then, can society be, which is composed of such men? It must be terrible, and, indeed, it is terrible.”
“[T]he chief evil from which men suffer has for a long time not consisted in this: that they do not know God’s true law; but in this: that men, to whom the knowledge and the execution of the true law is inconvenient, being unable to destroy or overthrow it, invent ‘precept upon precept and rule upon rule,’ as Isaiah says, and give them out as just as obligatory as, or even more obligatory than the true laws of God. And so, the only thing that now is needed for freeing men from their sufferings, is this: that they should free themselves from all the theological, governmental, and scientific reflections, which are proclaimed to be obligatory laws of life, and, having freed themselves, should naturally recognize as more binding upon them than all the other precepts and laws, that true, eternal law, which is already known to them, and gives, not only to a few, but to all men, the greatest possible good in social life.”
“ ‘What is to be done?’ ask both the rulers and the ruled, the revolutionists and those engaged in public life, always attaching to the words, ‘What is to be done?’ the meaning of, ‘How should men’s lives be organized?’ ¶ They all ask how to arrange men’s lives, that is to say, what to do with other people; but no one asks, ‘What must I do with myself?’ … ¶ [T]he chief cause of men’s stagnation in a form of life they already admit to be wrong, lies in the amazing superstition… that some men not only can, but have the right to, predetermine and forcibly organize the life of others. ¶ People need only free themselves from this common superstition and it would at once become clear to all that the life of every group of men gets arranged only in the same way that each individual arranges his own life. And if men — both those who arrange others’ lives, and those who submit to such arranging — would only understand that, it would become evident to all that nothing can justify any kind of violence between man and man; and that violence is not only a violation of love and even of justice, but of common sense.”
“Suppose a problem in psychology was set: What can be done to persuade the men of our time — Christians, humanitarians or, simply, kindhearted people — into committing the most abominable crimes with no feeling of guilt? There could be only one way: to do precisely what is being done now, namely, to make them governors, inspectors, officers, policemen, and so forth; which means, first, that they must be convinced of the existence of a kind of organization called ‘government service,’ allowing men to be treated like inanimate objects and banning thereby all human brotherly relations with them; and secondly, that the people entering this ‘government service’ must be so unified that the responsibility for their dealings with men would never fall on any one of them individually.”
Thoreau:
“It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters.”
“There is but one obligation and that is the obligation to obey the highest dictate. — None can lay me under another which will supersede this. The Gods have given me these years without any incumbrance — society has no mortgage on them. If any man assist me in the way of the world, let him derive satisfaction from the deed itself — for I think I never shall have dissolved my prior obligations to God.”
“I must conclude that Conscience, if that be the name of it, was not given us for no purpose, or for a hindrance. However flattering order and expediency may look, it is but the repose of a lethargy, and we will choose rather to be awake, though it be stormy, and maintain ourselves on this earth and in this life, as we may, without signing our death-warrant. Let us see if we cannot stay here, where He has put us, on his own conditions. Does not his law reach as far as his light? The expedients of the nations clash with one another, only the absolutely right is expedient for all.”
“The disease and disorder in society are wont to be referred to the false relations in which men live one to another, but strictly speaking there can be no such thing as a false relation if the condition of the things related is true. False relations grow out of false conditions.”
“Consider the cloak that our employment or station is; how rarely men treat each other for what in their true and naked characters they are; how we use and tolerate pretension; how the judge is clothed with dignity which does not belong to him, and the trembling witness with humility that does not belong to him, and the criminal, perchance, with shame or impudence which no more belong to him. It does not matter so much, then, what is the fashion of the cloak with which we cloak these cloaks. Change the coat; put the judge in the criminal-box, and the criminal on the bench, and you might think that you had changed the men.”
“Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are not good? Is there any necessity for a man’s being a tool to perform a deed of which his better nature disapproves? Is it the intention of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever? Are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit? What right have you to enter into a compact with yourself that you will do thus or so, against the light within you? Is it for you to make up your mind, — to form any resolution whatever, — and not accept the convictions that are forced upon you, and which ever pass your understanding? I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial cases. Business men may arrange that among themselves. If they were the interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another thing.”
“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.”
“A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences… They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments… ¶ The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, &c. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.”
“My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with, — for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel, — and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action.”
“If… a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him, that he who is living near him, sometimes even sustains him, but never the State. Its officer, as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, a jailer or constable it may be, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff. Herein is the tragedy; that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior and brutal ones. Hence come war and slavery in; and what else may not come in by this opening?”
Walter Raleigh:
“[N]o senate nor civil assembly can be under such natural impulses to honor and justice as single persons; for politic members meet with neither encouragement nor reproaches for what was the effect of number only. For a majority is nobody when that majority is separated, and a collective body can have no synteresis, or divine ray, which is in the mind of every man, never assenting to evil, but upbraiding and tormenting him when he does it: but the honor and conscience that lies in the majority is too thin and diffusive to be efficacious; for a number can do a great wrong, and call it right, and not one of that majority blush for it. Hence it is, that though a public assembly may lie under great censures, yet each member looks upon himself as little concerned: this must be the reason why a Roman senate should act with less spirit and less honor than any single Roman would do.”

This may seem a little out-there, but I’d like you to consider radical honesty as a tactic with potential to augment a tax resistance campaign.

Radical honesty at its most extreme means abjuring subterfuge — conducting your campaign in the open, in plain sight, without trying to take your opponent by surprise through trickery, and without trying to influence people by “spin” and lopsided propaganda. But it also means studiously refusing to participate in the dishonesty by which your opponent holds on to power and deceives those who give in to it.

Radical honesty has several potential advantages:

  1. It provides a stark moral contrast between your campaign and whatever institution you are opposing.

    In The Story of Bardoli, Mahadev Desai described how this played out in the Bardoli tax strike:

    …a regular propaganda of mendacity was resorted to [by the Government]. The Government’s way and the people’s way presented a striking study in contrasts. On one side there were secrecy, underhand dealings, falsehood, even sharp practice; on the other there were straight and manly speech, and straight action in broad daylight.

    This contrast can make your campaign more appealing to potential resisters and to by-standers, and can increase the morale of the resisters in your campaign.
  2. Tyranny thrives on mutual dishonesty, and honesty threatens it.

    The way people signal their loyalty to the tyrant is to participate in the lie. When everybody around you is participating in the lie, it feels like everyone is loyal to the tyrant. Vaclav Havel wrote of this:

    Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

    But people may start to refuse:

    Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.

    Tolstoy went even further, and claimed that radical honesty was itself enough to topple governments:

    No feats of heroism are needed to achieve the greatest and most important changes in the existence of humanity; neither the armament of millions of soldiers, nor the construction of new roads and machines, nor the arrangement of exhibitions, nor the organization of workmen’s unions, nor revolutions, not barricades, nor explosions, nor the perfection of aërial navigation; but a change in public opinion.

    And to accomplish this change no exertions of the mind are needed, nor the refutation of anything in existence, nor the invention of any extraordinary novelty; it is only needful that we should not succumb to the erroneous, already defunct, public opinion of the past, which governments have induced artificially; it is only needful that each individual should say what he really feels or thinks, or at least that he should not say what he does not think.

    And if only a small body of the people were to do so at once, of their own accord, outworn public opinion would fall off us of itself, and a new, living, real opinion would assert itself. And when public opinion should thus have changed without the slightest effort, the internal condition of men’s lives which so torments them would change likewise of its own accord.

    One is ashamed to say how little is needed for all men to be delivered from those calamities which now oppress them; it is only needful not to lie.

  3. Honesty keeps the campaign on the straight-and-narrow.

    In a tax resistance campaign, as in any activist campaign, there are frequently temptations to take short-cuts. Rather than winning a victory after a tough and uncertain struggle, you can declare victory early and hope to capitalize on the morale boost. Rather than doing something practical that takes a lot of thankless hours, you can do something quick and symbolic that “makes a powerful statement.” Rather than fighting for goals that are worth achieving, you can choose goals that are more achievable. Radical honesty gets you in the habit of avoiding temptations like these.
  4. Honesty is itself a good thing worth contributing to.

    If you conduct your campaign in a radically honest way, you contribute to a cultural atmosphere of trust and straightforward communication. In this way, even if you do not succeed in the other goals of your tax resistance campaign, you still may have some residual positive effect.
  5. Honesty means there’s a lot of things you no longer have to worry about.

    For instance, you don’t have to keep your stories straight, you don’t have to worry about leaks of information that might cast doubt on your credibility, you don’t have to be so concerned with information security, and you don’t have to worry about spies and informers in your midst who might blab your secrets to the authorities. This leaves you free to spend your energy and attention playing offense instead of defense.

Tolstoy’s quotes come from his essay Patriotism and Christianity, and Vaclav Havel’s from The Power of the Powerless. Another good essay on this theme is Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Not To Live By Falsehood.