Solzhenitsyn: "The Western world has lost its civil courage" - [PEACE]

[Zenaan Harkness]

This is another foundational problem we face, and put in a way which is easy to immediately grok: The Western world has lost its civil courage.

Solzhenitsyn said this in a speech in 1978.  A longer quote for context is provided below:

       “The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and
       separately . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable
       among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite. Should one point out
       that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the
       beginning of the end? 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 . . . The next war (which does not have to be an atomic
       one and I do not believe it will) may well bury Western civilization
       forever.”


This is up there with "we don't control our own lives".

As said by many to date, the first step to solving any problem, is understanding that problem, and to this end, succinct problem statements are useful to share understanding with others - and surely, without many others seeing a problem, what hope have we to solve that problem?



   Will You Choose Freedom?
    Stacey Rudin via The American Institute for Economic Research
   https://www.aier.org/article/will-you-choose-freedom/
   https://www.zerohedge.com/political/will-you-choose-freedom

      In George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel “1984,” protagonist Winston
      wonders whether he is the only person who retains a real memory and
      doubts the narrative of The Party. He has no way to find out whether
      everyone else truly believes the government-revised version of history,
      or simply acts like they do; discussing such matters is verboten,
      punishable by vaporization: deletion from history. Fortunately we are not
      quite at that point in the United States — no one has yet been vaporized.

      .. Democracy lives or dies based on the characters of the people that
      comprise it. In centuries past, those who fought to build this country
      learned lessons about the value of freedom the hard way and passed down
      their wisdom: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a
      little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” We didn’t
      heed the warning. We just willingly sacrificed the Constitutional rights
      they fought for in order to hide from a virus with a 997 out of 1000
      survival rate.

      Many who were disquieted by the widespread elevation of fear into virtue
      never said a word due to concern over “looking bad,” hoping someone else
      would step up to fight against the absurd new moral construct calling
      good, hardworking people murderers if they won’t sacrifice their entire
      lives and livelihoods for an indefinite period. It is hard not to see
      ourselves in Solzhenitsyn’s observation:

         “A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in
         the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger…We
         [in the East] have been through a spiritual training [producing]
         stronger, deeper, and more interesting characters than those generally
         produced by standardized Western well-being.”

      We got away with our lack of character-building challenges for quite
      awhile, but when “disaster” struck it laid us bare. We met the enemy, and
      he is us.

      ...