Readings for Troubled Times: Live Not by Lies

Over at Jeremy Beer’s Philanthropy Daily, Rod Dreher reminds us to read Live Not by Lies.

“What you should read: “Live Not By Lies,” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Why: How does a good man resist evil when he is powerless? The final communiqué Solzhenitsyn issued to the Soviet people on the eve of his 1974 arrest and expulsion to the West was a short essay explaining how to do it: Live not by lies! The Soviet system was built on lies, and on the willingness of the people to pretend that these lies were true. But the one thing that even the most demoralized person can do to fight the system is to refuse its lies, no matter the personal cost. Don’t write or say what you know is untrue. Don’t allow yourself to be seen doing anything that gives the official liars reason to think you are on their side.

“There are no loopholes for anybody who wants to be honest,” said Solzhenitsyn. “On any given day any one of us will be confronted with [a choice]. Either truth or falsehood: Toward spiritual independence or toward spiritual servitude. And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul—don’t let him be proud of his “progressive” views, don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a merited figure, or a general—let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and warm.”

We live in a time of ideological madness, with commissars and scoundrels demanding allegiance to lies, and testimonies to untruth. If, out of fear, you give them what they want, they will own you forever. Solzhenitsyn knew. So had we better.”