How the West's Freedom Leads to Slavery

A life-changing lesson from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You have been told a lie.

You are told that freedom is about choice—that the more choices you have the more free you are. That freedom is about a plurality of options to satiate your desires—and any restraint on choice is tyranny.

This is a lie.

It is a lie that leads to you be a slave to your own desires, a tyrant over your own soul.

True freedom is something completely different—it is an ancient understanding of how the soul achieves true liberty and conforms to all that is true, good, and beautiful. Understanding the distinction between modern freedom and Christian freedom will change your life.

And one of the most famous warnings to the West about its false sense of freedom came from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in front of 20,000 people.

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The Famous Warning

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stood before 20,000 people at the 1978 Harvard graduation ceremony. Aleksandr, a Russian who had suffered trumped up charges under the Soviets, had spent ten years in prison, in hard labor camps, and in exile before coming to the United States. He had risen to fame in the West by shining a light on Soviet atrocities through his writings, such as The Gulag Archipelago, a true accounting of those who endured the inhumanity of the Soviet labor camps.

Thus, as he stood before Harvard University, he was expected to lambaste the Soviets and praise the West, especially the United States, in which he had found refuge.

Yet, Aleksandr took an unexpected turn.

While he certainly lamented the suffering of his homeland under the Soviets, he asked the question of whether he would recommend the West as a model for his home country…

He answered “no.”

Shocking his audience, he further explained that under the West men and women had become fractured, atomized, and subject to a false freedom. He observed that this false sense of freedom had taught mankind that there was no “higher force” above him—that man was an autonomous moral universe.

It was a freedom that would end in ruin.

And this disease, this false freedom, that Aleksandr diagnosed in the late 1970s has only metastasized and increased in severity.

Christians stress that you must understand the distinction between this slavery that masquerades as freedom, and the true freedom that brings internal liberty and all that is true, good, and beautiful.

It is one of the most important spiritual lessons you could learn.