His 1978 speech (in green) continued from the previous post . . .

Well-Being

When the modern Western States were created, the following principle was proclaimed: governments are meant to serve man, and man lives to be free to pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American Declaration). Now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state. Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the morally inferior sense which has come into being during those same decades. In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to obtain them imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings. Active and tense competition permeates all human thoughts without opening a way to free spiritual development. The individual’s independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, leading them to physical splendor, happiness, possession of material goods, money and leisure, to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment. So who should now renounce all this, why and for what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of common values, and particularly in such nebulous cases when the security of one’s nation must be defended in a distant country?

Even biology knows that habitual extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.

*** End of Solzhenitsyn excerpt

Alexander is merely saying what many others from the East observed in the years following the 1960s — the life of ease was making us Americans soft. He thought our youth looked soft in 1978 — no need to ask what he would make of today’s youth in America or our entertainment centered culture.

What if he was correct? Is our social order dysfunctional at a basic and foundational level? Is the rat race really all that bad for us? Is a nanny state, the welfare state, all that threatening to our social preservation?

A blogger ask us to:
Consider this quote by Eighteenth Century writer and lawyer, Alexander Tytler:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

Does this sound much like our recent election cycles? Voting our pocketbooks too often means voting to borrow money to serve selfish interest of the day. This is moral weakness, as we put ourselves and our progeny in debt to service perceived needs of the hour. Democracy allows this too easily. Constitutional governance guards against it. Unfortunately many see our constitutional governance as a mere nuisance in this postmodern age of the welfare state.

Tytler wrote of an inevitable cycle in the life of democracies:
1) From Bondage to spiritual faith;
2) From spiritual faith to great courage;
3) From courage to liberty;
4) From liberty to abundance;
5) From abundance to complacency;
6) From complacency to apathy;
7) From apathy to dependence;
And then the cycle is completed as society sinks From dependence back into bondage.

*** end quote

Is the United States of America somewhere on the above cycle?

I think Alexander would have replied in the affirmative in 1978, and even more so in 2008.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Great dissidents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.