Live Not By Lies: A Manual For Christian Dissidents

"We live in a world of lies, whether we want it or not. That's just the case. But you shouldn't accommodate to it." That statement, a reflection on the present as much as the past, is from Maria Wittner, a hero of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviet occupation. 

With the developed world infected by an intellectual and spiritual poison that rivals that of the thought-control beloved within the Communist system, such insight into how to remain free is a valuable message.

Wittner is one of the survivors of the Soviet-backed totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe after World War II that writer Rod Dreher interviewed for his book titled Live Not By Lies: A Manual For Christian Dissidents published in the United States late last year.

A Communist court sentenced Wittner to death when she was 20. However, this was commuted to life imprisonment. You have a choice, she says: "If you want to live in fear, or if you want to live in the freedom of the soul. If your soul is free, then your thoughts are free, and then your words are going to be free."

Dreher called on the experience of European dissidents such as Wittner to learn how Americans in the first instance can prepare for what he sees as a soft form of totalitarianism, epitomised by wokism and the cancel culture, where the elite of academia, the mainstream media, and the corporate world, use all the levers of power at their disposal to control what is to be regarded as morally correct and socially acceptable.

As an observer in a distant land, I grieve at the way American society has become so toxic with the decline of Christian civilisation that made the nation so attractive in the international context. Now, it's easy to identify the marks of of a rapidly developing dictatorship in the United States, which seems to go beyond that what exists or is developing in Western Europe. The social sickness so evident daily, the lack of meaning in life among the young, and the failure of older Americans to display moral strength, all point to social collapse being not far away. 

This is how Dreher summarises his well-supported thesis:

The essence of modernity is to deny that there are any transcendent stories, structures, habits, or beliefs to which individuals must submit and that should bind our conduct. To be modern is to be free to choose. What is chosen does not matter; the meaning in is in the choice itself. There is no sacred order, no other world, no fixed virtues and permanent truths. There is only here and now, and the eternal flame of human desire. Volo ergo sum - I want, therefore I am.