The world is not changed by those whose voices are joined to the clamor of common opinion, but rather by those who stand athwart it offering another way. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was one such man. The burden of such a role, however, is that of persecution, alienation, and controversy. A contemporary example might be found in Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, the Canadian clinical psychologist whose notoriety can be first attributed to his principled opposition to a piece of legislation the aim of which was to mandate the use of gender pronouns, and to charge as hate speech any deviation therefrom. Both Solzhenitsyn and Peterson chose to stand for certain long-held truths because they possessed the proclivity to look down the path of least resistance and saw mostly the type of darkness for which mankind seems fated.
The events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, pointed to the poisonous fruit that can come from the tree of ideology. We saw what happens when otherwise honest and well-meaning men and women lose sight of a higher order and commit themselves to the muck and the mire of strong men, false gods, and a lack of meaning. We see the beginnings of the world that gave us Solzhenitsyn, but only by forgetting all about which we were warned. A recently released collection of essays from the University of Notre Dame Press on the work and thought of Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul and the West, makes this point, among others, as it aims to provide a fuller view of the man while in the process making the case for why not just his work, but indeed his counterintuitively Russian worldview, may be exactly what the West needs to survive.
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