Solzhenitsyn on Fashionable Thinking

[ToryNotion]

A Fashion in Thinking

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era. There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events.

excerpted from 'A World Split Apart' by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises, Thursday, June 8, 1978

[sophocles07]

Good.

[ToryNotion]

Full text of the Address

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html

[ToryNotion]

I was re-reading the full address and this gem really popped out at me:

There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the East where the press is rigorously unified: one gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole. It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment and there may be common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspapers mostly give enough stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.

[Expatriate]

Wow. I recently read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and really enjoyed it (well, as much as one can enjoy a book about suffering under the Soviets). It really made me grateful for my relative freedom in Canada and the comparably luxurious life I live.

I'm amazed by Aleksandr's insight here into this "fashionable thinking" problem that pops up even in "free" societies. I don't have time to read the whole address right now but will do so tomorrow. Thanks for bringing this to the light, ToryNotion!

[DanConway]

I'm currently in the process of acquiring hardcover copies of the Archipelago, all three volumes, 1,700 or so pages of it. I've wanted to read it ever since, years ago, I first read these irrefutable words, taken from the first chapter:

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?...The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers...and notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"

[constituent]

i believe that archipelago should be required reading

on the subject....


this (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=73117&highlight=required) should be required viewing.

g. edward griffin interviews a soviet (kgb) defector.