Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center — A World Split Apart

So many great ideas here. 1. We live today in a state of constant anxiety about the dangers that could strike unannounced at any moment. Liquid Fear means fear flowing on our own court, not staying in one place but diffuse. The trouble with liquid fear unlike the concrete specific danger which you know and are familiar with is that you don't know where from it will strike. We are walking as if on a mine field. We are aware that the field is full of explosives but we can't tell where they will be an explosion and when. There are no solid structures around us on which we can rely, in which we can invest our hopes and expectations. Even most powerful governments very often cannot deliver on their promise — they don't have enough power to do so. Your job, even in the most reputable and apparently very rich company, they suddenly disappear too. Or warning: you go to bed, you may wake up, redundant. The partnerships between people not so fragile. They are "until further notice" — they are not "till death do us part". And when two people are in a similar situation and they know when they are here together because they bring satisfaction to each other. Now if they know about that, they live in constant fear: what about if the other partner first decides that it is time to give notice and disappear. So on every level of human life, you have the same situation. Uncertainty. Impossible to predict the future and even after you have made your decision, after long long deliberation, very careful with a meticulous calculation. Looking retrospectively you still are not sure whether you made the right or wrong decision. 2. There are two crucial values without which a human life is simply inconceivable. One is security, a measure of security, feeling safe. The other is freedom, the ability to self-assert, to do what you really would like to do and so on. They are both necessary. Security without freedom is slavery. Freedom without security is complete chaos where you are lost, abandoned, you don't know what to do. We are incredibly more free than our grandfathers or great grandfathers were. But we pay the price. We have to exchange it for security — a good deal of security has been surrendered. 3. Divisions between people and conflict between people is as old as humanity. There was always intermixing of the processes of integration and separation. For the first time we are in a situation where we have to to commit the next step on the road to integration without the separation. Separation was always the instrument and the guiding strategy of the integrating effort. If you wanted to integrate people, you had to point to their joint enemy, joint stranger — which is against us and we need to watch and be vigilant and defend ourselves. But the next step is already step towards people who are in cosmopolitan situation. But that means the whole humanity. No enemy remaining against whom we will integrate. It's a new situation, untested and unpracticed so far. And it's what makes our present moment, on one side, terrifying, and on the other, so exciting, so fascinating. 4. I remember a great German poet, Wolfgang Goethe. Romantic poet. He was asked if he had a happy life. And his answer was: "Yes! I had a very, very happy life but...,’’ he added immediately, ‘‘I don’t remember a single happy week." And that’s against the contemporary philosophy. A warning for us because we have been brought up by marketing, by advertising, by ever new temptations, seductions and so on, ever new fashions — to think about happiness as an uninterrupted row of better and better pleasures. And what Goethe suggests is that happiness is in overcoming unhappiness. Troubles. In one of his poems, he said that the worst nightmare is a longs, long row of sunny days. The alternative of that is not happiness but boredom, lack of excitement, lack of purpose to pursue, to fight for and so on. What Goethe said was a warning for the younger people really. Don’t think about your life as a collection of gifts picked up from the unlimited container of pleasurable items. Think about life as a long, long struggle, you resolve one trouble, comes another, and the side-effects are very often unpleasant.