A Blog to the Lesser Good

The simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies.

 

Though lies may conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, they will not do so with any help from me.

 

This opens a breach in the imaginary encirclement caused by our inaction. It is the easiest thing to do for us, but the most devastating for the lies. Because when people renounce lies it simply cuts short their existence. Like an infection, they can exist only in a living organism.

 

We do not exhort ourselves. We have not sufficiently matured to march into the squares and shout the truth our loud or to express aloud what we think. It's not necessary. It's dangerous.

 

But let us refuse to say that which we do not think. This is our path, the easiest and most accessible one, which takes into account out inherent cowardice, already well rooted.

 

Our path is to talk away from the gangrenous boundary. If we did not paste together the dead bones and scales of ideology, if we did not sew together the rotting rags, we would be astonished how quickly the lies would be rendered helpless and subside. That which should be naked would then really appear naked before the whole world.

 

So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood - to feed our family - or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one's children and contemporaries.

from Live not by Lies

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn