This image has such power that one can say that, after thirty years, it has become a global archetype: an image of the power of individuation, of the will and steadfastness of one person standing against naked falsehood and violence armed to the teeth, and challenging it.

The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent many years of his life in exile and forced-labour camps, writes in his harrowing book The Gulag Archipelago:
“An ordinary step for courageous individuals in a society is simply that they do not join in its lies. A drop of truth can sometimes destroy an ocean of falsehood.”

This statement by Solzhenitsyn, together with several others attributed to him, is repeatedly invoked in the film Cloud Atlas, starring Tom Hanks. In one scene, an engineered clone named Sonmi-451, who is transformed from a servant into a prophetic figure who influences generations after her, is questioned before her execution. The archivist recording her final testimony asks why she chose to speak what she knew when she also knew that doing so would lead to her death.

Sonmi replies: “Truth is singular. Its ‘versions’ are mistruths. If I had remained invisible, the truth would have stayed hidden. I couldn’t allow that.”

The archivist then asks in astonishment:
“But what if no one believes this truth of yours?”

Sonmi looks into his eyes and says:
“Someone already does.”

Dostoevsky, too, in The Brothers Karamazov, writes through Father Zosima:
“Above all, do not lie to yourself. A person who lies to himself and listens to his own lies eventually reaches a point where he can no longer distinguish truth from falsehood, either in the world outside or even within his own heart. Little by little he loses respect both for himself and for others. Having lost respect in his heart, he loses the capacity to love. And when his heart is emptied of respect and love, he inevitably sinks into his own dark and demonic side.”

Dostoevsky again writes in The Idiot that lying to oneself is rooted in our nature even more deeply than lying to others. In his view, if our dream is of a world in which truth prevails, we must first allow truth to prevail within us.

To be overcome by truth, each of us, even if only once, must question what we have surrendered to in the name of ideology, tradition, family and society, and if we sense a falsehood in our heart, stand against it as one individual.

If we look at the history of North Korea, the Soviet Union, or even modern forms of politics in many Western societies, we see that despite intensive police control, repressive power, military force, and societies stripped of individuation, propaganda remains at the highest level. This shows that forces of authoritarianism have always understood that physical control alone is insufficient: the mind of each individual must also be controlled. It also shows that freeing the mind of each person from society is the first and most important step toward freeing society itself.

It is always independent individuation, rather than the collective, that is the enemy of authoritarianism. Collective ideologies are constructed from many doctrines that divide the world according to religion, beliefs, race, gender, social class and dozens of other factors that separate human beings in the external world. For precisely this reason, whatever title an ideology bears, one principle holds for all of them: their foundations are built upon hatred and fear. Without realising it, followers are drawn into these collective ideologies through hatred of something or someone, of a political system or ideological belief, or even through fear of loneliness and of standing against public opinion.

Even the individualism of the modern world, which has developed through consumerism supported by capitalism in the West, is itself another ideology that has destroyed genuine individuation in our world: a place where we sacrifice the Self at the feet of an egoism filled with externally produced desires, where all of us want only what every other member of the herd wants.

The existential process of individuation is not individualism. Consumerist capitalist individualism is focused on the exterior—consumption and political and economic freedom—whereas existential awakening is focused on the interior, the inner world.