Natan Sharansky: The Power Of Truth
Man, I love Tablet magazine so much. Here’s a terrific essay in it by Natan Sharansky, the celebrated Soviet refusenik and dissident, talking about the double-mindedness that was necessary to live normally in the Soviet Union. Young Sharansky thought that if he entered the world of science, he would not have to live by the lies that most Soviet citizens did:
I spent my high school years as an academic grind, drowning in problem sets, working around the clock to amass five out of fives in mathematics and physics. Because I knew that I had to follow a very specific script to get the character reference I needed from the local Komsomol authorities, I also spouted the right slogans, participated in the right youth activities, and sang the right songs. Yet even after I fulfilled my young dreams and made it to MFTI—Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the Soviet equivalent of MIT—the scrutiny continued. We math and science students had to keep paying lip service to the Soviet gods, like everyone else. We kept taking tests on Marxist doctrine every semester, even when studying at the postdoctoral level. A few years later, I would be amused when, during my interrogations, I spied my KGB tormentors studying their Communist handbooks whenever they could. I liked knowing that these never-ending trials kept tormenting them.
Our professors subtly encouraged us to brush such annoyances aside. We were the elite, they kept telling us, racing toward a golden future. It was all worth it. I was luxuriating in the sanctuary of science, an asylum protected from the daily insanity the Soviets imposed on nearly everyone else. I decided that the deeper I was into my scientific career, the less stressful this double life would be.
It was a comforting illusion—until I read Andrei Sakharov’s manifesto.
Sakharov was our role model, the number one Soviet scientist sitting at the peak of the pyramid each of us was trying to climb so single-mindedly. In May 1968, this celebrity scientist circulated a ten-thousand-word manifesto that unleashed a wrecking ball which smashed my complacent life. “Intellectual freedom is essential to human society,” Sakharov declared. Bravely denouncing Soviet thought-control, he mocked “the ossified dogmatism of a bureaucratic oligarchy and its favorite weapon, ideological censorship.”
Sakharov warned that Soviet science was imperiled without “the search for truth.”
That did it for Sharansky. Sakharov exposed the lie that science was free. There was no escape from the life of lying — and that life meant that almost nothing the Soviets did was ever going to be as good as it was in the West, where people could tell the truth without being jailed, fired, or cancelled.
That’s when Sharansky became a refusenik and a dissident. He explains in moving prose how he found more freedom in prison for the truth than living “free” in the USSR, but bound by the shackles of lies. More:
Once I had done it, once I was no longer afraid, I realized what it was to be free. I could live in history, a real history, with ups and downs, fits and starts, not the bland, ever-changing history-like-putty dictated by the authorities. I could live with real people and enjoy real friendships, not the cautious, constricted conversations of winks and nods among fellow doublethinkers. Most important, I could live without that permanent self-censorship, that constant checking of what you are going to say to make sure it’s not what you want to say. Only then do you realize what a burden you’ve been carrying, how exhausting it is to say the right thing, do the right thing, while always fighting the fear of being outed for an errant thought, a wrong reaction, an idiosyncratic impulse.
Here Sharansky makes the same point I do in Live Not By Lies: that wokeness is imposing on us a totalitarianism that is not the same as the harshness of the Soviet version, but that forces more and more of us all to lie all the same:
Over the last three decades in freedom, I have noticed that—with apologies to Tolstoy—every dictatorship is oppressive in its own way, but the doublethinkers’ mental gymnastics are all alike. The feeling of release from the fear and giddy relief when crossing the line from doublethink to democratic dissent is also universal across cultures. This understanding prompted the Town Square Test I use to distinguish between free societies and fear societies: Can you express your individual views loudly, in public, without fear of being punished legally, formally, in any way? If yes, you live in a free society; if not, you’re in a fear society.
In the West today, the pressure to conform doesn’t come from the totalitarian top—our political leaders are not Stalinist dictators. Instead, it comes from the fanatics around us, in our neighborhoods, at school, at work, often using the prospect of Twitter-shaming to bully people into silence—or a fake, politically-correct compliance. Recent polls suggest that nearly two-thirds of Americans report self-censoring about politics at least occasionally, essentially becoming a nation of doublethinkers despite the magnificent constitutional protections for free thought and expression enshrined in the Bill of Rights
To preserve our integrity and our souls, the quality of our political debate and the creativity so essential to our cultural life, we need a Twitter Test challenging bottom-up cultural totalitarianism that is spreading throughout free societies. That test asks: In the democratic society in which you live, can you express your individual views loudly, in public and in private, on social media and at rallies, without fear of being shamed, excommunicated, or cancelled? Ultimately, whether you will live as a democratic doublethinker doesn’t depend on the authorities or on the corporations that run social media platforms: it depends on you. Each of us individually decides whether we want to submit to the crippling indignity of doublethink, or break the chains that keep us from expressing our own thoughts, and becoming whole.
Please read all of Sharansky’s essay.
It is adapted from his new memoir (with Gil Troy) Never Alone: Prison, Politics, And My People. He is one more living example of the freedom and integrity you can have if you are willing to suffer for the truth. We should all want to be a Natan Sharansky. When these little piss-ant commissars come around demanding that we say things we know are lies, may God give us the courage to do as Sharansky did. If you read this essay, you’ll learn the story of a Soviet-era writer who gained massive privileges by repeating the Communist Party line — but the toll it took on his soul was devastating.
This will happen to you too if you live by the lies it takes to get ahead in these woke institutions.
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