The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete Reads Ryszard Legutko's 'Demon in Democracy' Part 2

Episode Date: November 23, 2024

46 MinutesPG-13Pete continues a reading of a book that greatly influenced him, "The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies" by Ryszard Legutko.The Demon in DemocracyPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Antelope Hill - Promo code "peteq" for 5% off - https://antelopehillpublishing.com/FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% off - https://www.foxnsons.com/Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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And yeah, can't do it without you. So thank you for the support. Head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to part two of my reading of Rizard Lagutgos, The Demon in Democracy. We are up to section five. of part one, and we are just going to jump right back in.

A third narrative remains regarding the transition to the new system, the one about mankind's reaching and developing its full creative potential. Although one strongly emphasized, this eventually lost its importance and virtually disappeared. Regardless of the fact that some socialist visionaries tried to revive it from time to time, it had no place in communist reality. The new regime fell into the trap of gigantic, practical, problems. Who and for what purpose would consider humanities achieving self-knowledge at a time when the people were desperately grappling with chronic scarcity, and their leaders were courageously struggling with the new problems they themselves had created? It is paradoxical that socialism,

which began with a great humanistic message, not only quickly lowered its aspirations, but made them indistinguishable from the objectives that had already been realized, with much more success by its main competitor, capitalism. The young Marx still used the language of Hegel to describe mankind's road to full flourishing, but the mature Marx chose to write about surplus value, which clearly referred to economic exploitation, and the way to overcome it. It is therefore hardly surprising that from the very beginning, the communist country focused on the problem of labor, which liberated from exploitation and the burden of surplus value would bring an unprecedented increase in productivity. These countries and their governments fought a never-ending but unfortunately,

persistently, unsuccessful battle to produce enough goods for their citizens, and the more they failed, the more they aspired to superiority over capitalist economies. That's one of the problems that you have with the state. when the state is there to solve problems for you and not protect you and protect your culture and protect what you're if they're stepping in well if something fail if their solution fails they're not going to give it back to you so that you can figure it out they're just going to try and keep correcting it and finding a solution themselves. And if there is no one there who knows how to do it or is willing to do it,

or if they deliberately understand that the more problems that you have, the more problems a society has, the more you need them, well, you're up the creek. No matter how much they mobilized mass production called for extra effort designed ever more ambitious five-year plans, the shortages of goods persisted, and the distance between the standard of living under capitalism and socialism steadily increased. No major economic problem was ever solved. All the riots and revolutions that broke out in communist countries had economic roots. This was not the only reason they occurred, but was nevertheless very important. The communists also sought to provide citizens with adequate servings of pleasure to be enjoyed

privately, but also, and more importantly, with their satisfaction showing for the world to see. At the beginning, the latter was confined to simple signs, usually by working men and women who, after a day's hard work, danced and sang in the streets to the tune of propagandistic songs. Over time, with progressive stabilization, the communists discovered that pleasure and entertainment were an extremely serious political matter. They realized that if a communist society was to resist a capitalist temptation, it should secure a comparable level of consumer goods for its citizens. A model communist man was thus defined by three elements, ideology, work, and leisure. Once these three objectives were fulfilled, it was to be expected that the communist citizen

would internalize his deep commitment to the system, work efficiently, and abandoned for good the idea of the revolt, because after work, he would have sufficient access to enjoyable activities. One compared to the full pathos of the declarations of the classics of Marxism, promising man's spectacular flourishing under the communist system, it is hard indeed not to marvel about a dramatic reduction in expectations. Liberal and democratic thought has been, from the very beginning, with few exceptions, minimalist when it comes to its image of the human being. The triumph of liberalism and democracy was supposed to be emancipatory, also in the sense that man was to become free from excessive demands imposed on him by unrealistic metaphysics invented by an aristocratic culture in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In other words, an important part of the message of modernity was to legitimize a lowering of human aspirations.

Aspiring to great goals was not ruled out in particular cases, but greatness was not. no longer inscribed in the essence of humanity. The main principle behind the minimalist perspective was equality. From the point of view of a liberal order, one cannot prioritize human objectives. Only the means can be prioritized in terms of efficiency, provided this does not jeopardize the rules of peaceful cooperation. In parentheses, it is neither less nor more rational to desire the wealth of Croesus than the poverty of a Buddhist monk, wrote the liberal economist Ludwig von Mises.

There were, as I have said, exceptions to this view. Few but worth noting, among the 18th century authors Kant, who defended liberalism, set up high standards for humanity. In the 19th century, John Stuart Mill and T.H. Green had similar intentions. The last two aptly perceived the danger of mediocrity that the democratic rule was inconspicuously imposing on modern societies. They both believed, difference is notwithstanding, that some form of liberalism, or rather a philosophy of liberty, was a possible remedy to the creeping disease of mediocrity. Mill remained under the partial, albeit indirect influence of German romanticism, and thus attributed a particular role to great creative individuals whose exceptionality or even eccentricity could, in a free environment, pull men out of a democratic slumber. But these ideas did not find followers, and liberal democratic thought and practice increasingly fell into the logic of minimalism.

Lowering the requirements is a process that has no end. Once people become used to disqualifying certain standards as too high, impractical, or unnecessary, is only a matter of time before inertia takes its course and even the new lowered standards are deemed unacceptable. One can look at the history of liberal democracy as a gradual sliding down from the high to the low, from the refined to the course. Quite often a step down has been welcomed as refreshing, natural, and healthy, and indeed it sometimes was. But whatever the merits of this process of simplification, it too often brought vulgarity to language, behavior, education, and moral rules. The growing vulgarity of form was particularly striking, especially in the last decade. decades, moving away from sophistication and decorum. A liberal democratic man refused to learn these artificial and awkward arrangements, the usefulness of which seemed to him at first doubtful and soon null. He felt he had no time for them, apparently believing that their absence would make life easier and more enjoyable. In their place, he established new criteria, ease, practicality, usefulness, pleasure, convenience, and immediate gratification. the combination of which turned out to be a deadly weapon against the old social forms.

The old customs crumbled, and so did rules of propriety, a sense of decorum, a respect for hierarchy. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the door, doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale,

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Ask in store for details. So, liberalism does what is intended to do. to destroy hierarchy, to destroy the past, to seek to put mankind on a new path, and a path that is permanent. So there's no stability. There's no order. It's constant change. These changes were often attributed to the deplorable influence of the bourgeoisie,

the class that was said to embody the disappearance of four. and the vulgarity of the modern era. There was an immense output of creative works depicting the shallowness of the mercantile civilization. The antidotes of commerce was, as evidenced by Thomas Mann's, Budden Brooks, and John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga, art as a pure disinterested expression of imagination

in pursuit of the beautiful and the sublime. But over time, it became clear that commerce and capitalism had been, and blamed somewhat hastily, and that the cause is laid deeper. More prospective thinkers soon realized that the very successive technology, productivity, and industry, that great achievement of the genius of modern man, was conducive, as Jose Ortega Igassette, persuasively argued, to the sterility of imagination and the triumph of self-satisfied pettiness. There was, and still is something paradoxical in the fact that

a historically unprecedented explosion of technology and industry, which brought wealth and security to millions of people, and which would not have been possible without a high degree of creativity, was a major factor in reducing people's aspirations, and astonishingly giving mediocrity a touch of respectability. Man, feeling secure and enjoying the increasingly abundant benefits of a modern civilization, was slowly releasing himself from the competitive, telling pressure of strict and demanding rules derived from religion and classical ethics.

You have to leave those things, those antiquated things behind. Can't have progress if you have those, right? He was no longer in the mood to embark on a painful and uncertain journey to hire goals, on which John Stuart Mill elaborated with such hope, and his hopes were high. In a famous passage of his utilitarianism, he said that although man aspires to satisfy his drive for pleasure, he will always prefer to be unsatisfied Socrates rather than a satisfied pig. Why? The argument was the following. Man is cognizant of both states, the Socratic and the Swinish, and there is no way that reason and conscious will allow him to opt for being a pig.

The argument thus assumes in an unequivocable way that some ways of life are objectively better than others, that the Socratic model is clearly superior to that of common man, and that there is nothing in human nature that can make people oblivious to this fact. This last assumption, however, has been challenged since the very beginning of modern times. In liberal democracy, especially in recent decades, a generally acknowledged moral directive forbids looking down on people's moral priorities, because in the present society, equality is the norm, not the hierarchy. But equality, as always has its limitations. Mediocrity has been generally, though tacitly acknowledged, as a non-controversial, if not preferred model, whereas the Socratic model, though nominally viewed as equal

among others, has lost its appeal and support from the Democratic mainstream as too aristocratic and elitist. In theory, the Socratic way is as good as any other, in practice it is hopelessly at odds with modern preferences. From a new perspective, the pig would seem, on reflection, a stronger competitor. If you're following, you see this path, where this path is brought us. The gradual process in which to hire aspirations were being replaced by the lower tell us, no doubt, something about human nature. Namely, that unless met with strong resistance or an attractive inspiration, it shows a powerful

tendency to be lured by the common and the mediocre. Common, indeed, has ceased to be a word of disapproval in a liberal democratic rhetoric, or rather, has ceased to be used at all. When so much is common, nothing really is. This change is but a small signal of a corruption of basic categories by which for centuries people described and evaluated their conduct. Especially striking is a change in the meaning of the word dignity, which since then His antiquity has been used as a term of obligation, oblige. If one was presumed to have dignity, one was expected to behave in a proper way as required by his elevated status. Dignity was something to be earned, deserved, and confirmed by acting in accordance with the higher standards imposed by a community or religion, for instance, by empowering a certain person with higher responsibilities, or by claiming that man was created in God's image.

dignity was an attribute that ennobled those who acquired it. As noblesse oblige, dignity was an obligation to seek some form of self-improvement, however vaguely understood, but certainly closer to the Socratic way and further away from its opposite. The attribute was not bestowed forever. One could always lose it when acting in an undignified way. At some point, the concept of dignity was given a different meaning, contrary to the original. This happened mainly through the intercession of the language of human rights, especially after the 1948 Universal Declaration. The idea of human beings having inalienable rights is counterintuitive and extremely difficult to justify.

It may make some philosophical sense if derived from a strong theory of human nature such as one finds in classical metaphysics. However, when we accept a weak theory attributing to human beings only elementary qualities, and deliberately disregarding strong metaphysical assumptions, then the idea of rights loss, then the idea of rights loses its plausibility. It may, of course, be sanctioned as a mere product of legislation through a parliamentary or court ruling, which entitles people to make various claims called rights. But these claims will be no more than arbitrary decisions

by particular groups of politicians or judges who choose to do this rather than due to circumstances, ideology or individual predilections or under pressure from interest groups. In other words, it's not going to happen organically. It will be imposed from top down. And the way it should be, when you properly understand top down, is the top is to protect you and your beliefs and your predilections and your ideology and what you stand for. It would indeed be silly to call such claims inalienable, because inalienability by definition cannot be legislated.

Thus, in order to strengthen the unjustified end, within the accepted conceptual framework, unjustifiable notion of human rights, the concept of dignity was invoked, but in a peculiar way so as to make it seem to imply more than it actually did. The concept created an illusion of a strong view of human nature and of endowing this nature with qualities nowhere explicitly specified by implying something noble, being in an immortal soul, an innate desire for good, etc. But on the other hand, in using this concept unaccompanied by other qualifications, the framers of the human rights documents apparently felt exempted from any need to present an explicit and serious philosophical interpretable. of human nature and to explain the grounds and the conditions on which one could conceive of its dignity. This operation, a more precisely slight of hand and not very fair to boot, led to a sudden revival of the concept of human dignity, but with a radically different meaning, one that politicians, and especially in the democratic framework, could now enforce. giving them increasing their power, increasing their importance. Since the issue of universal declaration, dignity has no longer been about obligation,

but about claims and entitlements. The new dignity did not oblige people to strive for any moral merits or deserts. It allowed them to submit whatever claims they wished, and to justify these claims by referring to a dignity that they possessed by the mere fact of being born without any moral achievement or effort. In other words, they could just make shit up and say, I deserve this. You can't criticize me because I was born with a penis and I want to cut it off. Or I'm going to keep it and you have to call me a woman. Or I'm going to cut it off and you have to call me a woman.

Just to use an example from the zeitgeist. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast.

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D-E-A-L-S? Yeah, D-E-A-L-S. Deals. Oh, right. Yes, our Black Friday deals are eye-catching, but the letter chart's over here. Oh, sorry. At Speck Savers, we've got all sorts of unmissable Black Friday's

deals, like up to 70 euro off one pair of designer glasses. Offer ends on 7th of December 2025. Conditions apply. Ask in store for details. A person who desired to achieve the satisfaction of a pig was thus equally entitled to appeal to dignity to justify his goals as another who tried to follow the path of Socrates, and each time for a pig and for Socrates, this was the same dignity. A right to be a pig and a right to be a Socrates were, in fact, equal and stem from the same moral, or rather non-moral, as the new dignity practically broke off with morality, source. Having armed himself with rights, modern man found himself in a most comfortable situation with no precedent. He no longer had to justify his claims and actions as long as he qualified

them as rights. Regardless of what demands he would make on the basis of those rights, and for what purpose he would use them, he did not end, in fact, could not lose his dignity, which he had acquired for life simply by being born human. In some cases, barely. And since having this dignity carried no obligation to do anything particularly good or worthy, he could, while constantly invoking it, make claims that were increasingly more absurd and demand justification for ever more questionable activities. Sinking more and more into arrogant vulgar. he could argue that the vulgarity not only did not contradict his inborn dignity, but it could even, by a stretch of the imagination, be treated as some sort of an achievement.

After all, can a dignity that is inborn and constitutes the essence of humanness generate anything that would be essentially undignified or non-human? The dignity-based notion of human rights was thus both a powerful factor to legitimize a minimalist concept of human nature and its legitimate child. Moreover, it equipped modern anthropological minimalism with the instruments of self-perpetuation, the most efficient instruments of this kind ever devised in the history of the Western societies. Six. Work and entertainment, plus, as we shall see later, ideology that shaped the human existence in communism

and gave basic content to people's lives, more or less reflected, but also caricatured what was happening to modern men in the capitalization. civilization. In modern times, work became something more than earning means for survival and material security. It was a vocation, which gave human life discipline, meaning, and order. If we are to believe Max Weber, the first stirrings of this epoch-making change had a religious character. His argument was the following. The initiating factor was an acute and unbearable awareness, typical of early Protestantism, of the sinfulness of human beings. nature. This turned men's minds to work, which they began to treat as an expression of piety,

imposing on human sinfulness some form of discipline. But because the fruits of work could not be enjoyed, such enjoyment would be sinful. One could not consume them. And because they could not be consumed, then, and this is where the actual civilizational revolution happened, they had to be invested. This was a fundamental change. What it meant was that for the first time on such a scale in their history, people abandoned a deeply embedded desire to seek wealth simply as a means to indulge in expensive and extravagant whims. Work still produced wealth, as it was always hoped it would, but was no longer valued primarily as a means to consumption. Discipline work became its own proper reward, devoid of dreams about future joys and satisfied temptations, being completely

rationalized and subordinated to a long-term plan of action. In Weber's view, this new approach to consumption as being separated from pleasure and postponed to an indefinite future was at the root of an unprecedented economic growth that was brought about by capitalism. Weber's analysis gives us a good—Vabor's analyses gives us a good—we's analyses gives us a good insight into why and how modern thinking justified the lowering of aspirations. A minimalist view of human nature, initially apparent first and foremost in Protestantism, but later on expanding to other areas of the Western world, had a specific nature. The basic cause of the change was purely religious. A new doctrine of predestination,

as well as fundamental weight attributed to the original sin, precluded any form of moral and spiritual perfectability. Big plans for man were no longer feasible, but at the same time, the low level to which human aspirations were reduced, acquired a noble, sometimes even heroic trait, which, let us add, completely disappeared together with the liberalization of the Protestant doctrine. It is true that man acknowledged his powerlessness vis-à-vis the great plans,

those plans that in the past were said to lead him into vanity, but he put all his energy and will into doing as best he could in the lower realm, the only one accessible to him because of his corrupted nature. And this realm was work. You see this in politics nowadays, with a we lose down here form of Christianity who's like, oh, no, we're not supposed to be involved in politics. you know, we have original sin and no, God, you know, Jesus told us to love our enemies.

He didn't tell you to love his enemies. I swear some people, some, I have to assume some look at the Spanish Civil War and the nationalist side, which was, you know, probably, what, 90% Catholic? And just assume that those people were complete sinners. that they were wrong, that they should have let their country be handed over to communists and anarchists and that, you know, their plans to kill half the country so that they could institute their new communist order, their new socialist order, that they should have just allowed that to happen because, you know, who cares?

This paradoxical view of human nature brought about by the Protestant Revolution, man belittled his status while at the same time drastically increasing his requirements within the lower realm could not for too long retain its viability. The natural downward pull of minimalism turned out to be stronger as the initial discipline had to become less and less compelling. At some point, the old capitalism which had rejected consumerism and owed its success precisely to this rejection was transformed into a system in which consumption not only came to be accepted, but in fact took control of the entire economic mechanism and gradually marginized most human incentives,

eventually to become the single most powerful source of motivation. The road to this stage was complex, and getting there took a long time. But before this happened, the modern bourgeois civilization had its long period of glory, when, by having expoused the classic concept of human nature, and releasing all channels of human creativity through the capitalist revolution, it managed to transform spectacularly our civilization and to accomplish extraordinary things in all areas of life. The consumer's change was, of course, to be expected by some and welcomed by many. Mr. Gradgrind of Dickens' hard times, a strict, fanatically disciplined modern man,

mercilessly attempted to eradicate human weakness, is a despicable figure, and as such perfectly illustrates a negative perception of a classical capitalist by the humanist critics of a modern society. Mr. Gradgrant is deaf to temptations, unresponsive to warm emotions, and simple pleasures, motivated purely by new rationality and by nothing else. His callousness seems almost inhuman. But capitalism finally changed and the severity of the world's Gradgruns disappeared. The religious background of the new economy so persuasively, described by Weber, evaporated, and the capitalism itself, while continuing the ethic of the discipline of work and pushing productivity to new records of efficiency and inventiveness, liberated itself completely from the Protestant gloom.

The liberal democratic society abandoned the old-time rigor without regret. The discipline of work and high requirements of productivity persisted in the new times, But in other matters, man refused to go back to his previous self. Once having made a decision about having his aspirations reduced, he unabashedly enjoined this new situation and compensated the strict work imperatives by his ever-increasing indulgence in entertainment. But this new predilection, so different from his previous somberness, had consequences unanticipated and even unfathomed by Weber.

Naturally, entertainment always constituted a strong inclination of human, existence, but for centuries it was rigorously separated from the serious component of man's life. Lent and Carnival could not be confused because each of them responded to different needs and performed different functions. But when the minimalist anthropology took hold, the barriers separating one from the other weakened and the temptation to give entertainment more and more prominence became irresistible, particularly in societies in which the fear of sin had lost is deterring power. You catch them in the corner of your eye.

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Cooper. Design that moves. finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited Subject to lending criteria Terms and conditions apply Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited Trading as Cooper Financial Services

is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland Ready for huge savings We'll mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th Because the Liddle Newbridge warehouse sale is back We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items All reduced to clear From home essentials to seasonal must-habs When the doors open, the deals go fast.

Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. In today's world, entertainment is not just a pastime or a style, but a substance that permeates everything. Schools and universities, upbringing of children, intellectual life, art, morality, and religion. It has become dear to the hearts of students,

professors, entrepreneurs, journalists, engineers, scientists, writers, even priests. Entertainment imposes itself psychologically, intellectually, socially, and also, strange as it may sound, spiritually. A failure to provide human endeavors, even the most noble ones, with an entertaining rapping, is today unthinkable and borders on sin.

It's, I mean, think about everything, it's like, well, how are you going to sell this? I mean, you're not going to get anybody to go to your church unless it's a freaking cold play concert, right? I mean, everything is entertainment. Advertising has the Super Bowl commercials. It's all entertainment. People who play video games make fun of people who watch sports ball.

The modern sense of entertainment increasingly resembles what Pascal long ago called divertismet, that is, an activity as he wrote in his thoughts, that separates us from seriousness of existence and fills this existence with false content. Divertement is thus not only being entertained in the ordinary sense of the word, but living and acting within artificial rules that organize our lives, setting conventional and mostly trivial goals, which we pursue, getting involved in disputes and competition, aspiring to honors making careers,

and doing everything that would turn our thoughts away from fundamental existence. matter, existential matters. By escaping the questions of the ultimate meaning of our own lives or of human life in general, our minds slowly get used to that fictitious reality, which we take for the real one and are lured in and are lord by its attractions. The difference between Pascal's divertismet and today's entertainment or rather having fun as it has come become customary to say is that the modern man, no matter how much a desire to have fun is captured his soul, knows very well that it is an artificial construction, not the real thing. Whether some other more objective reality exists is to him a matter of indifference,

and if told there is not, he would probably still remain unmoved. Having neutralized all musings about objectivity, the modern man takes pride in his deep involvement and entertainment, which in the absence of other objective references, he considers natural. This aspect of entertainment and disturbing consequences of its present reign came under scrutiny nearly a century ago, since its absorbing presence and its impact on human life have increased immeasurably. It is interesting that both the conservatives defending the classical view of human nature

and some of the sociologists of the Frankfurt School, while having fundamental disagreements, described this new fundamental, phenomenon in similar terms and were equally alarmed by the extent to which the human mind was degraded and enslaved by what was claimed to be an extremely pleasant, unproblematic, but somehow in superior form of freedom. Both groups feared that the hegemony and the omnipresence of entertainment might effectively dilute a sense of the seriousness of existence as well as the type of mindset that gives this seriousness a proper role in thought and action.

For the first time in the entire history of mankind, there appeared a type of human being who thought not having been surrounded by entertainment from cradle to grave in all areas of life was an anomaly. Of course, liberal democracy should not be singled out as the only cause of this mental revolution. There were other causes, capitalism, secularism, technology, and other equally important factors. The fact is, however, that for the important reasons, liberal democracy and entertainment found enthusiastic allies in each other,

entertainment became the most obvious and direct manifestation of freedom that liberalism offered humanity, and at the same time the most tangible confirmation of the dominant status of the democratic man and his tastes. To be sure, his dominance was larger, deeper, and more consequential, by no means exhausted itself in an inner necessity to have fun. And yet the omnipresence of entertainment was something by which the Democratic man became easily recognized. It was his trademark, his coat of arms, his, so to speak, symbolic identity

card. Makes me want to break out my Florida Panthers jersey or my New York Yankees hat. Are you getting it? Seven. Once we assume anthropological minimal is to be a key to understanding today's liberal democracy, it becomes clear why the liberal Democrats wholeheartedly embraced a belief in the inevitability of history. This belief was, of course, a legitimate offspring of the Enlightenment faith in progress to which the liberal Democrats are even more committed than the socialists themselves, also partly the disciples of the Enlightenment dogmas. In view of the fact that liberal democratic civilization brought a spectacular development of technology

and succeeded in providing millions of people with the benefits of modernity, the belief in the inexorability of progress is, at least within the limits delineated by the liberal democratic mind, not without rational foundations. The primary source of the belief in unidirectional history is thus man himself. A remarkable correlation exists between the regime. and the man, one that had never in history been achieved on a similar scale. The communists attempted to mold the communist man to fit the institution and logic of the communist system, but suffered defeat. But where they failed, the liberal Democrats proved successful. If ever any system existed that was perfectly tailored to the aspirations of the people

inhabiting it, it was liberal democracy. And if ever any human model existed that was perfectly tailored to opportunities offered by the political system into the aspirations enhanced by it, it was a liberal, democratic man. Alternative political models have not been drawn or even seriously considered, and the effectiveness of the regime is still impressively high. Therefore, an expansion of liberal democracy will probably continue, and the system will continue to confirm the set of beliefs that the inhabitant of the regime not only claims to live by, but also holds to be the only set of beliefs that are worth living by. He feels privileged and lucky not to be like those unfortunate fools or rascals who have failed to accept the obvious.

All these factors taken together reinforce his belief that if the world is to survive and develop, it must move on in one and only one direction, his own. This view has become contagious and it quickly spread to the conversation. communist countries at the time, when they face fundamental future choices after having parted with the old regime. One would think the fall of an unpopular, coercive, and evil regime would provide a unique opportunity for the nation to develop its own institutions at every level of social and political life, the institutions that would be responsive to its own needs, bearing witness to its own historical experience, and reinforcing a sense of a newly gained freedom and autonomy. me. This was the time when the creative potential in the nation, released from a long period of enslavement, should have manifested itself fully and most enthusiastically. But in Eastern Europe,

this was not the case. As if charmed by powerful but invisible political magicians, the East Europeans immediately succumb to what they consider to be the imperative of the historical development of Western civilization. The required attitude of a newly liberated nation was not that of creativity, but conformity. The events that took place after 1989 shattered the illusions many people harbored, which in the recent past had not seemed illusions at all, but had possessed some degree of credibility. Poland may be a case in point. Everything indicated that dramatic and painful historical experiences should make the polls

particularly suspicious of the new grandiose political projects aimed at restructuring the entire social substance. The riots that erupted more or less once per decade since 1945, when the Soviet Union imposed the communist system on Polish society, were read as an expression of such suspicions. There is no better illustration of the desire than the period of the so-called first solidarity in 1980, 1981. In July and August of 1980, workers held massive strikes against lawlessness and economic chaos, which led to the establishment of a powerful trade union in Poland, the first such big independent organization in the Soviet bloc. But the first solidarity was not just a trade union, and the demands it raised were not simply about the fair redistribution of wealth,

increases in wages and benefits, and workers' guarantees. The union's program also included more general demands far exceeding those ordinary human aspirations that seem all but natural in a permanently inefficient economy with humiliatingly low wages and notorious shortages of goods. Solidarity stood up in defense of human dignity,

in its original, and not the corrupted sense, access to culture, respect for truth in science, and for nobility and art, in a proper role given to Christian heritage and Christian religion. It seemed that suddenly those great ideas, is at the root of Western civilization, which this civilization had slowly begun to forget, were again brought to life and ignited like a fire in the minds of the members of a trade union. This was probably

one of the reasons why solidarity met with such widespread, though, short-lived admiration. Suddenly, in this god-forsaken place, there emerged a movement that not only challenged the evil empire, but reminded everyone of the spiritual dimension of human existence, of truth, God, heroism, nobility of culture, the importance of historical and religious heritage, and other high moral principles. During the period of the second solidarity in 1988-1989, the final chapter of the communist rule in Poland, this mood disappeared almost without a trace, and although the possibility of political victory was nearer than ever, the big ideas and ambitious plans lost their appeal. This change of attitude was somewhat understandable, considering the pressure of circumstances,

and after the communist lost their monopoly, an urgent need to resolve vast numbers of practical problems. But the fact remains that the new Poland, like other countries in the region, quickly discarded the higher concerns expressed by the first solidarity, and almost immediately adopted a minimalist perspective in order to conform to the atmosphere and practice of Western liberal democracy. Once big ideas were gone, work and entertainment seized the imagination, of the people and turned them into copies of a standard liberal democratic model.

Poland shook off the communist yoke at a time when the Western world had already reached a phase of considerable homogeneity and standardization. Therefore, as soon as the polls liberated themselves and started aspiring to be to the liberal democratic world, Poland lost his previous exotic charm as a country in which workers, intellectuals, and priests defied communism, prayed to God and risked their freedom in defense of truth, good, and beauty. The liberal democratic world did not want such exoticism in their midst and would have been embarrassed if the polls had persisted in their initial ambitions. It expected a different poland, the one that was indistinguishable from other nations. Following this or that pattern of liberal democratic order provided it covered all areas of social

life. The polls grasped this quickly, and the majority of them adapted to the expectations without protest and without regret. There was, of course, an unpleasant side to it. The societies that liberated themselves from the old rules adopted new ones, but were unaware that new rules gave them less liberty and fewer opportunities than they had naively hoped, being blinded by the radiant vision of the free world. Many East Europeans were ready to admit that. All the though the world was not moving inexorably toward communism, as the communists had tried to convince them for a long time, and with relatively good results, it still moved inevitably in another direction. Just as the Soviet Union had been the vanguard of progress before, so now it was

the West, which often meant the United States and sometimes the European Union. The East Europeans were supposed to follow in their footsteps. The metaphors of catching up and a race were often used to describe the situation of the societies that joined the world in liberal democracy. They were somewhere in front of us, rushing fast forward, while we remained in the back, trying to make up for lost time by doing all the things that they did, but in a shorter period of time. The result was that innovation and inventiveness, so much talked about, praised and encouraged by all in sundry and paid homage to in words, could not be taken seriously as challenges and never became a really respected attitude. The deeper wisdom was to copy and to imitate.

The more we copied and imitated, the more we were glad of ourselves. Institutions, education, customs, law, media, language, almost everything became all of a sudden imperfect copies of the originals that were in the line of progress ahead of us. All right, that's the end of chapter one. I'm going to finish right there. I hope you're enjoying this. This really explains a lot and really starts to get down into the minutia of modernity and also tracing the ideas of modernity.

But really laying out and getting down into the weeds of dignity and what dignity used to mean and what dignity means today, which is one of the most important things that we've forgotten. Chapter 2 is called Utopia. We'll be back with that one in a couple days. Thank you.