Richard Feidler

And that's again where it's really important to remember that the pocketbook is not the end all be all.

People do not act in their economic self-interest, not because they're stupid, but because some things are more important to them than their economic well-being.

But the other thing is that when you are at the precipice,

then all you can do is think about how your family is going to survive.

And the idea that you may purposely destabilise your country by voting the tyrant out, if we suppose for a second that you have that power, that's actually a very frightening idea.

You want to at least stay at the edge of the precipice.

It's something we should always have in mind, but it should also bear in mind, I think more importantly right now, is that when bombs start falling on people, they do not tend to blame their leader for it.

They tend to blame the people who are throwing the bombs.

Yeah, it seems counterintuitive at first, but I think what she's talking about is that the cynicism, and this will be recognisable to us now, is this assertion that the world is rotten, that everyone is driven by just craven self-interest, that there is no such thing as shared values.

And then the person who just sold you on this idea that the world is rotten says, okay, believe everything I say.

And it's an irresistible proposition because the rug has just been pulled out from under your feet.

You believe in nothing at this moment because the world is rotten, because we have no shared values.

And so you enter into this agreement with the totalitarian leader to believe everything they say.

I've always been a little bit suspicious of that scene in Kundera's novel, even though I'm a big Kundera fan.

But he was trying to figure something out about the essay that he had written about Czech destiny before Prague Spring was crushed.

He wrote it before it really became impossible to write politically, right?

And when it became very dangerous to write politically, he left the country and stopped writing politically.

So I think he was trying to negotiate something with himself, which, again, I'm not trying to stigmatize that, but I think there's something very complicated going on there.

But I think that for most people, the experience of not signing or writing something or saying something

is the experience of breaking away from society.