On New Year's Day 1990, playwright Vaclav Havel said these words as the newly elected President of Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic):
We live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves.
How remarkable that the leader of a country would place the blame for his people's suffering in a totalitarian state squarely on their own shoulders! So much is happening in that second sentence. After setting it up with a first sentence that likens immorality with toxicity, Havel uses fell to imply an accident and morally ill to suggest a sickness, much like we consider a personality disorder or substance abuse an illness. Then he shifts to thought, learning, belief, and care, which are innate human capacities that each of us is responsible for cultivating.
Notice how Havel refrains from ending that second sentence with what we thought was true, not to spare his audience from listening to those final two words but to place an even greater burden on them. They were, he insisted, responsible for everything they thought. They did not speak their minds against a brutal, self-serving, authoritarian regime. They created a reality that contradicted what they knew was morally just. Powerful writing.
