Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

by Doris Lessing

This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that—a descent into barbarism,

During the Second World War, from the moment the Soviet Union was invaded by Hitler and became an ally of the democracies, that country was affectionately regarded in popular opinion. Stalin was Uncle Joe, the ordinary chap’s friend, Russia was the land of brave, liberty-loving heroes, and Communism was an interesting manifestation of popular will—which we should copy. All this went on for four years and then suddenly, almost overnight, it went into reverse.

To have lived through such a reversal once is enough to make you critical for ever afterwards of current popular attitudes.

think writers are by nature more easily able to achieve this detachment from mass emotions and social conditions.

Uh, how flattering. Not my experience at all.

means that if you are a member of a close-knit community, you know you differ from this community’s ideas at the risk of being seen as a no-goodnik, a criminal, an evil-doer. This is an absolutely automatic process; nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically. But there is always the minority who do not, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody, depends on this minority. And that we should be thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack.

and if there are rebels and heretics, that is even more satisfying,