"The safeguard against tyranny (is) to strengthen individual responsibility"
Doris Lessing, "The Cult of the Individual" (1956)
https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/doris-lessings-letter-to-the-reasoner-november-1956/
= The reaction to the 20th Congress has been expressed in party circles throughout the world in the phrase ‘the cult of the individual’.
= That these words should have been chosen as the banner under which we should fight what is wrong with the party seems to me as a sign of the corruption in our thinking.
= For they suggest that what caused the breakdown of inner-party democracy was an excess of individualism.
= But the opposite is the truth.
= What was bad is not that one man was a tyrant, but that hundreds and thousands of party members, inside and outside the Soviet Union, let go their individual consciences and allowed him to become a tyrant.
= Now we are discussing what sort of rules we should have in the party to prevent the emergence of bureaucracy and dictatorship.
= A lot of worried and uneasy people are pinning their faith in some kind of constitution which will ensure against tyranny.
= But rules and constitutions are what people make them.
= The publication of the Constitution of the Soviet Union, an admirable document, coincided with the worst period of the terror.
= The party rules in the various communist parties are (I believe) more or less the same; but the development of the different communist parties has been very dissimilar.
= I think that this talk about changing the rules is a symptom of the desire in all of us to let go individual responsibility on to something outside ourselves, something on to which we can put the blame if things go wrong.
= It is pleasant to have implicit trust in a beloved leader.
= It is pleasant and comfortable to believe that the communist party must be right simply because ‘it is the vanguard of the working class’.
= It is pleasant to pass resolutions at a conference and think that now everything will be all right.
= But there is no simple decision we can make, once and for all, that will ensure that we are doing right.
= There is no set of rules that can set us free from the necessity of making fresh decisions, every day, of just how much of our individual responsibility we are prepared to delegate to a central body – whether it is the communist party, or the government of the country we live in, be it a communist or a capitalist government.
= It seems to me that what the last thirty years have shown us is that unless a communist party is a body of individuals each jealously guarding his or her independence of judgement, it must degenrate into a body of yes-men.
= The safeguard against tyranny, now, as it always has been, is to sharpen individuality, to strengthen individual responsibility, and not to delegate it.
= DORIS LESSING (London)
Amalia's Story, Chapter Sixty-Seven
= Amalia Angeloni Jacobucci
1000 Characters About My Mother #20:
"My father took a shower with me, and I turned out just fine!"
"What?!"
"What?"
"What you said?"
"I didn't say anything. Where were we?"
"Where were who? When?"
"Where were you and I, on what date did you and I leave off last week? In our chronology of my mother's life story? Keep up!"
"Um . . . July 1966. The Cub Scouts."
"October 13, 1966 . . . The regular meeting of the Go-Getter's Mothers Club will be held Oct. 19 at 8 p.m. at the elementary school . . . Apparently there was a mothers' group in place of a Parent-Teacher Association . . . the Go-Getters Club . . . Mrs. Louis J. Jacobucci will be the speaker of the evening. Mrs. Jacobucci Is district executive of the Cape Cod District of the MSPCC. This will be an open meeting and promises to be an interesting one. Guests are cordially invited to attend from any of the surrounding villages."
"So? What of it?"
"Mrs. Jacobucci Is district executive of the Cape Cod District of the MSPCC?"
"I'm sure it's just a typo. Move on."...
"What?!"
"I didn't say anything."
"How can you say such a thing?"
"I'm not going through this again."
"What do you mean?"
"All this -- denial. I'm done. I'm just going to say exactly what happened as I remember it."
"It never happened!"
"The reason I know it happened is that I renember it. I was eight years old. My brother was twelve years old. I was able to recover the date because I remember at some point in the week preceding the event, our father for some reason had told us, I'm going to be speaking at the Unitarian Church this Sunday at 11:00. It did not seem weird to me at the time, because he was always out of the house anyway. Plus all he used to when he was home was harangue me, so good."
"You lie."
"In fact, I remember thinking, it made sense that he would get something going on Sundays, because that was the only time he was ever even around anymore. Weekdays he was working, of course, and weeknights he was always at one of his many, many important community activities."
"You are delusional."
"Then, I found this article, and it all ...
"I have a thesis. My thesis is: In any woman's life, having children would have to be the most significant event. So, in my mother's story -- "
"Her family wasn't really any different from any of the other families."
"Yes."
"In what way?"
"She and her husband were both very active in community affairs. Both her children went to school."
"What else?"
"They were both boys?"
"Anything else?"
"No. That's it."
"So you said, that one way in which your mother's family wasn't really any different from any of the other families, was that she and her husband were both very active in community affairs. Can you tell me a little more about that?"
"Oh, sure. There was always something going on. Cub Scouts, she was like Den Mother of her older son's Cub Scout Pack. Pack 54. Plus the Comedy Club. Plus I'm pretty sure, she was involved in the kindergarten. She and her husband both. And politics. It was the Sixties."
"Just normal 60's Mom stuff."
"In any case, it's time to forget the past."
