https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONzLgOHD6uw at 57’14”

Chris Hedges: “As Hannah Arendt wrote in the Origins of Totalitarianism, the only morally reliable people are not those who say this is wrong or this should not be done but those who say I can’t. They know that, as Emmanuel Kant wrote, if justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning. And this means that like Socrates we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. We must at once see and act, and given what it means to see, this will require the surmounting of despair not by reason but by faith. I saw in the conflicts I covered the power of this faith, which lies outside of any religious or philosophical creed. This faith is what Havel called, in his essay The Power of the Powerless, living in truth. Living in truth exposes the corruption, lies and deceit of the state. It is a refusal to be part of the charade. And it has a cost. You don’t become a dissident because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career, Havel wrote, you are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”