Finally, Big Business’s embrace and promotion of progressive social values and the emergence of “surveillance capitalism”—the sales-directed mining of individual data gathered by electronic devices—is preparing the West to accept a version of China’s social credit system. We are being conditioned to surrender privacy and political liberties for the sake of comfort, convenience, and an artificially imposed social harmony.
This is the brave new world of the twenty-first century. Christian dissidents will be unable to mount an effective resistance if their eyes aren’t open to and focused on the nature and methods of social justice ideology and the ways in which data harvesting and manipulation can and will be used by woke capitalists and social justice ideologues in institutional authority to impose control.
It is coming, and it is coming fast. How should we resist it? That is the subject of the second half of this book.
PART TWO How to Live in Truth
CHAPTER FIVE Value Nothing More Than Truth
Solzhenitsyn was not the only dissident to make “live not by lies” the core of anti-totalitarian resistance. Czech playwright and future postcommunist president Václav Havel’s most famous injunction to would-be dissidents was to “live in truth.” In his most important piece of political writing, which was secretly passed around by samizdat, Havel wrote about “the power of the powerless,” which was the essay’s title.
Havel knew that he was addressing a nation that had no way to rise up against the might of the Czechoslovak police state. But he also knew something most of them did not: they were not entirely powerless.
Consider, he said, the case of the greengrocer who posts a sign in his shop bearing the well-known slogan from the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the world, unite!” He doesn’t believe in it. He hangs it in his shop as a signal of his own conformity. He just wants to be left alone. His action is not meaningless though: the greengrocer’s act not only confirms that this is what is expected of one in a communist society but also perpetuates the belief that this is what it means to be a good citizen.
Havel goes on:
Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.1
This costs him. He loses his shop, his salary is cut, and he won’t be able to travel abroad. Maybe his children won’t be able to get into college. People persecute him and those around him—not necessarily because they oppose his stance but because they know that this is what they have to do to keep the authorities off their backs.
The poor little greengrocer, who testifies to the truth by refusing to mouth a lie, suffers. But there is a deeper meaning to his gesture.
By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.2
A Russian Orthodox mystic of the nineteenth century, Saint Seraphim of Sarov, once said, “Acquire the Holy Spirit, and thousands around you will be saved.” In that sense, what the greengrocer has done is a small act of rebellion that may act as the spark of a revolution that saves liberty and humanity.
A person who lives only for his own comfort and survival and who is willing to live within a lie to protect that, is, says Havel, “a demoralized person.
“The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society,” he writes. “Living within the truth, as humanity’s revolt against an enforced position, is, on the contrary, an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility.”3
Václav Havel published that essay in 1978. A year later, the communist government returned the troublemaking writer to prison. Ten years later, Havel led a revolution that peacefully toppled the regime and became the first president of a free Czechoslovakia.
In time, a mere writer willing to suffer for truth took power
