“The decline of courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately … There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more in their self-serving rationale as to how realistic, reasonable and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state politics on weakness and cowardice.
A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty and irresponsible critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that every step is well-founded and absolutely flawless … Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints.
Because instant and credible information is required, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, and then are left hanging. The press can act as the role of public opinion or miseducate it.
Very well known representatives of your society say ‘We cannot apply moral criteria to politics.’ Thus we mix good and evil, right and wrong, and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute evil in the world. After a certain level of the problem has been reached, legalistic thinking induces paralysis. And yet no weapons, no matter how powerful, will help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower … to defend ones self, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well being.
… Born in the Renaissance [the mistake] has made man the measure of all things on the earth � imperfect man… We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. … If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently MUST be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material good and then their carefree consumption.”
� Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in a June 8, 1978 commencement address to Harvard University students.