Almost 50 years ago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stood before Harvard and warned that the most striking feature of the modern West was a ‘decline in courage’.
His audience winced.
They wanted flattery, not truth. But he was right then, and he is even more right now.
Courage has bled away not only from our leaders but from the culture itself. It began when conviction in moral values was surrendered, when relativism hollowed out certainty and left a vacuum. Into that vacuum rushed grievance and victimhood.
If morality is nothing but a mask for power, then anyone can claim the crown of the oppressed? Victimhood becomes currency, grievance becomes a qualification for power, and courage collapses – because the common man, worn down by the postmodern assault on truth, no longer dares to defend what he knows in his bones to be right.
The reason we open our minds is so that, at some point, we can close them on something true.
That act – the moment of conviction – requires courage. The courage to not go along just to get along. The courage to say in public what one believes in private. The courage to draw a line between good and evil, right and wrong. Open-mindedness pursued as an end in itself is not a virtue; it becomes indistinguishable from apathy. And apathy is precisely what has allowed governments to buy our silence. They dangle handouts and subsidies before us, and in exchange, we surrender our responsibilities. Each surrender makes them feel more justified in constraining our freedoms in the name of safety and security.
Solzhenitsyn warned that a society governed only by legality is ‘not quite worthy of man’. In Australia, we now see the proof. Hate speech and ‘misinformation’ bills threaten to punish citizens for speaking plain truths if they offend a protected group. The law, once a shield, is turning into a gag. Legality is not morality; it has often become its opposite.
And now we have Tony Burke, Minister for Home Affairs, barring Candace Owens from entering Australia. Whatever one thinks of Owens – and I personally believe she has fallen too deep into the pit of clickbait – that is beside the point. What should outrage every Australian is the breathtaking arrogance in the reasoning behind her ban. The government did not allege she posed a physical threat, only that her words might upset people. Since when did emotional comfort become a national-security interest?
This is what happens when a government treats adults like children who must be protected from dangerous ideas lest they think for themselves.
But should we really be surprised?
When we allowed politicians to lock us in our homes for reasons that still invite debate, when we allowed them to criminalise offence and impose speech codes, when we nodded along as they urged neighbours to dob each other in for disobedience, we taught them exactly how much cowardice we would tolerate. When we let them decide what our children can read, watch, and learn, did we imagine they would stop there?
The ban on Owens is not about her. It is about us – about how little courage remains in the national bloodstream. It is a test, and we are failing it. A free people who will not defend the right of others to speak do not deserve their own right to speak for long. Today it is Owens; tomorrow it will be someone who offends you less but still offends someone enough to silence them.
Australians, this is not a rehearsal. If you do not hear Solzhenitsyn’s call to courage – if you do not take back what is yours – you will get more control, more regulation, more government benevolence that ends in dependence and, eventually, obedience. The man who trades responsibility for comfort will lose both.
Meanwhile the press, which once prided itself on speaking truth to power, now flatters power and buries truth. Its dishonesty is not accidental; it is structural. Superficiality and distortion masquerade as reporting. The result is not courage but conformity, not journalism but public relations. A media that decides what we may hear and a government that decides whom we may hear from are two sides of the same cowardice.
The way back is not downward but upward. We must remember that freedom without responsibility is not freedom but decay. Life is not given for comfort; it is given for duty, sacrifice, and the growth of courage and character. Solzhenitsyn ended his address with a warning that could be written for us today: ‘No one on Earth has any other way left but – upward.’
That is our summons. That is the task before Australia.
