Solzhenitsyn and Today
Part 1 of 2
Shakespeare once wrote “what’s past is prologue.” If we look into history, we can find many examples of human evils as well as triumphs. If we study the values of the Enlightenment, and learn from them, we can build on them and continue striving and living in a free and just society. It can never be perfect, because it is man made, but we can hold it as our “north star” to help guide the way. If we ignore the evils of our past, those too, can set us up to repeat them. If we don’t learn and think about how we got to a point where the Gulag Archipelago existed and no one did anything about it until Solzhenitsyn’s writing made it too glaring to continue living under a veil of ignorance, there is little doubt that it will be repeated. To be naïve and say we are a better society than they were is to ignore the very essence of mankind, as so eloquently put by Solzenitsyn in that “the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
Ignoring the past altogether is all the more dangerous. To that point, when someone mentions “death camps,” one almost automatically thinks of the Holocaust. This is in no way to deny the importance of learning about the Holocaust and knowing the evil that it was, but how is it that we turned our back to the creators of the “death camps” in the Soviet Union? Hitler, after all, learned Stalin’s ways. As David Setter in the Wall Street Journal, “ In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies.” I would venture to say most millenials are not aware of this fact, and have not read the Gulag Archipelago — an embarrassing fact for myself as well until just recently. What is it that stops us from reading and thinking about that horror?
The Soviet Union was a communist country which eventually led to totalitarianism and the persecution of everyone that was against it, everyone remotely suspected to be against it, anyone that was considered “successful,” etc. There is a movement today in the United States that is trying to revive communism. But refusing to see its inevitable end in the examples of the past doesn’t erase the history. Once out of the veil of ignorance, one can point to numerous examples and hints of the Orwellian world they lived in and make the eerie connection to present day society. I will venture to make some of these examples and my thoughts behind them in this two-part essay.
Solzhenitsyn wrote:
“No camp can corrupt those who have a stable nucleus, who do not accept that pitiful ideology which holds that ‘human beings are created for happiness,’ an ideology which is done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel?…those people became corrupted in camp who before camp had not been enriched by any morality at all or by any spiritual upbringing.”
He then quotes M.A. Voichenko:
“In camp, existence did not determine consciousness, but just the opposite: consciousness and steadfast faith in the human essence decided whether you became an animal or remained a human being.”
Before we get further, we should take a closer look at the “essence” of a human being. The Oxford Handbook on Human Essence abstract description is:
“particular emphasis on the reciprocal relationships among individuality, sociality, and cultural embeddedness…individuality as a human essence, which is a view expressed in several chapters of the volume that draw insights from work on existential psychology, meaning, free will, self-evaluation, goals, and basic physiological processes…[and the] capacity for change and growth through the pursuit of truth, beyond individual self-interest, represents the human essence.”
To keep the human essence alive, individuality and the values of the Enlightenment are part of the deal. Solzhenitsyn seems to be making an argument of morality through religion in terms of stability and strength against corruption in the camps. M.A. Voichenko agrees with him, adding the human essence and consciousness of something greater to the resiliency against corruption. If we think about today’s society, it would hold true that morality (if not religion, where a case can be made that they can be held separately) and the values of individuality, freedom, self-reflection and above all, the pursuit of truth, are going to the be way to move forward to progress. The alternative is to instead lapse back into something that can escalate to totalitarianism and a “muzzled freedom,” as Solzhenitsyn aptly named the chapter through which this essay was inspired.
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A case can be made in today’s times that the freedom we have is already “muzzled” and some seem to prefer it that way for the sake of the group over the individual. One of the muzzles Solzhenitsyn referred to was “constant fear,” noting “any adult inhabitant of this country, from a collective farmer up to a member of the Politburo, always knew that it would take only one careless word or gesture and he would fly off irrevocably into the abyss.”
One. Careless. Word.
When we think about Gina Carano, Ellen Degeneres, J.K. Rowling, and countless more, there will be plenty of people who state this is not cancelling someone but rather dealing with the “consequences” of their actions — as if they know the whole and true story and aren’t just reading headlines from biased sources. Others will say that “cancel culture” is an alt-right conspiracy to hide hateful ideology. But to step out of a partisan viewpoint and try to see the truth, looking through the nuances of every specific situation, it is logical to conclude most cases are people being human and either expressing an unpopular opinion or just getting something wrong. Neither should be condemned nor found to be worthy of being “cancelled.” Is there really freedom if we are walking around afraid to say the wrong thing in case we get fired, scorned at, and shamed?
The natural defense from proponents of this state of affairs may be to say this only happens to people who willingly put their life in the public spotlight. Though that isn’t a valid excuse (you should not have to choose being in the public sphere or freedom of speech), one can point to countless examples of laymen getting “cancelled” due to ideological and destructive points of view. Take Smith College for example, and the mistaken case of racial discrimination that left a chronically ill woman unable to find a job a year later, and a janitor who had to quit because he followed the orders of his superiors. The aftermath of which happened despite the investigation completed and reported that no evidence of racial discrimination was found; no apology was given, and no repercussions handed to the slander and abuse these two working class, innocent people faced. As Thomas Chatterton Williams so eloquently put it in a tweet, to summarize:
“If i found out my child attending a $78,000/year school pulled social rank on a janitor and a chronically sick kitchen worker to the point that the latter was being mobbed and unable to find employment a year later, i would be so ashamed i couldn’t sleep until it was rectified.”
But it was not a regret the student felt. It was only a misplaced entitlement supported by the college due to fear of being called callous or racist due to a situation that neither was the case. To drive this point home, a Bloomberg article reviewed a 2020 survey from the Cato Institute in which 62% of the masses agreed with this statement:
“The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive” (this was up from 58% in 2017)
⅓ of employed respondents said “yes” to:
“Are you afraid of losing your job or missing out on job opportunities if your political opinions became known?”
“The masses” included people from both sides of the political spectrum, all races and ethnicities, and the age group most worried about their jobs are 18–29 year old men and women. This is not the environment of a free society. And if the backbone of the fight against corruption is the human essence characterized by a pursuit of truth, self-evaluation, and individuality, one can properly surmise a cause for concern.
So what keeps this cycle going? Why not just stop and have faith that logical people will have your back? One possibility is once you are in the cycle, you are too afraid to get out. Reading Solzhenitsyn clarifies the psychology behind this, when he writes about informers. People getting “cancelled” need the people to do the “cancelling,” and a comparison can be made to the Soviet Union, where the government needed informers in order to arrest their opposition.
“Out of every four to five city dwellers there would most certainly be one who at least once in his life had received a proposal to become an informer…beyond the purpose of weakening ties between people, there was another purpose as well. Any person who had let himself be recruited would, out of fear of public exposure, be very much interested in continuing stability of the regime…and it turned out the least dangerous form of existence was constant betrayal.”
Though the repercussions are obviously not as severe as they were in the Soviet Union (which should go without stating), the spirit of the betrayals and the basic state of the society is eerily similar. Once you become a part of the “mob,” calling and shaming others for opposing viewpoints or any reason whatsoever, you know perfectly well how easily the mob can come for you. There is a logical side to our brain that knows throughout this cancelling process that it is exaggerated and uncalled for — most times. One can silence it when the attention is on someone else, but out of self preservation one comes to understand that they just as easily can be next. So, once part of the game, continuing the “stability of the regime,” in this case the calls for cancellation and reform, becomes the only safe bet. As you, dear reader, read through this next passage, keep in mind the ideas set forth in this article regarding cancel culture, the fear of speaking out, and society today:
The mildest and at the same time most widespread form of betrayal was not to do anything bad directly, but just not to notice the doomed person next to one, not to help him, to turn away one’s face, to shrink back. They had arrested a neighbor, your comrade at work, or even your close friend. You kept silence. You acted as if you had not noticed. (For you could not afford to lose your current job!) And then it was announced at work, at the general meeting, that the person who had disappeared the day before was…an inveterate enemy of the people. And you, who had bent your back beside him for twenty years at the same desk, now by your noble silence (or even by your condemning speech!, had to show how hostile you were to his crimes. (You had to make this sacrifice for the sake of your own dear family, for your own dear ones! What right had you not to think about them?) But the person arrested had left behind him a wife, a mother, children, and perhaps they at least ought to be helped? No, no, that would be dangerous: After all, these were the wife of an enemy and the mother of an enemy, and they were the children of an enemy (and your own children had a long education ahead of them)!
This constant betrayal, and the fear of it coming after the person themselves, Solzhenitsyn continues, is what “broke the soul of our freedom and opened it wide to corruption on a mass scale.” It is the tribal aspect of our human species that ignores the self as an individual and rather focuses on the group to which one belongs, the “us vs. them,” the “enemies vs. the people” that cancel culture and censorship bring out and reinforce every time a person is fired, or a college submits to the irrational allegations out of fear.
If we let this continue, and fearfully stay silent, it is what will break the soul of America and its freedom of speech. It is, therefore, up to each and every one of us to rise above what we know is wrong, fight against our reptilian tribal instincts through our rational thinking brain, and face the difficult task of standing up for what we know to be true instead of following the masses. The Soviet Union arrested people just to meet quotas, but they also made it a point to ensure those who publicly objected were swiftly arrested and silenced, so that the “picture of the monotonously obedient freedom remained unruffled.” It is only naivete to believe we have learned from the murderous regimes of the past when traces and the beginnings of these same regime tactics can be found in our own society today. Those “quiet departures” were “the dying of the soul of the people” for Russia, but we still have a chance to stir the ship the other way and we have the very values to prevent this from happening — freedom of speech being paramount. Censorship, and its sister cancel culture, is its antithesis.
