Individuation is the greatest courage of life, and this courage contains a force even greater than the courage required to stand before a tank. It is the force that enables us to make the fullest use of our capacity for free choice in life, and this is the most magnificent dimension of human existence: a force capable of changing the course of history and separating the future from the past.

At the end, I would like to share with you a beautiful scene from Dead Poets Society. In this scene, Robin Williams plays John Keating, a courageous and free-thinking teacher who has transformed the lives of his students. After being dismissed from the school on the basis of a letter that all the students were pressured into signing, he returns to the classroom to collect his belongings before leaving. In this scene, while all the students remain bowed in fear and shame beneath an atmosphere of tyranny and suffocation, one student—Todd—stands up on his desk, challenges the repression, speaks the truth, and salutes Keating with the words “O Captain! My Captain!”

At that moment, the other students, none of whom had dared even to raise their heads, stand one after another upon their desks and join the first student—the hero who has broken the silence.

The powerful message of this stirring and memorable scene is that “precisely where there is no hero, we must rise and become that hero.” Our standing upright beside truth and truthfulness will break the pervasive silence of darkness. But to find the capacity to stand and say “no” alone, we must first stop lying to ourselves and continually repeat to ourselves this statement attributed to Solzhenitsyn:

“If I cannot prevent falsehood and untruth from entering the world, and even if falsehood ultimately triumphs, I will not allow it to triumph through me.”

Aydin Areta