The Courage to Say No

The seminar opens with a scene from *Harry Potter* in which the Minister for Magic asks Harry to lend his public legitimacy to an institution in crisis. While Voldemort’s threat grows, the Ministry itself is corrupt, incompetent, and imprisoning innocent people. The request can be rationalised in many ways: the public needs hope, a greater enemy exists outside, and cooperation may appear strategically useful. Harry nevertheless says no because he recognises that his presence would legitimise a structure that, in his judgement, has violated truth.

From this fictional refusal, the seminar turns to the historical problem of obedience. Its central question is how ordinary human beings—not exceptional monsters—can participate in destructive systems. Christopher Browning’s *Ordinary Men* illustrates the gradual nature of moral collapse. Group pressure, obedience to authority, fear of separation, and habituation can move boundaries a person once imagined inviolable. The same mechanism appears on smaller scales: remaining silent when a colleague is humiliated, smiling at an abusive official, or cooperating with injustice so that one does not become the next target.

This is why authoritarian power cannot rely on physical coercion alone. Propaganda remains central even in heavily policed states because power also needs to control the interpretation of reality. If individuals can persuade themselves that what they see is not really injustice, or that responsibility lies elsewhere, a regime requires less direct force. Social liberation, in this reading, begins partly with liberation of individual judgement: the capacity to see, name, and refuse a lie even when the group has normalised it.

The seminar links this capacity to individuation. Being an “individual” here is not consumerist individualism or indifference to society. It means possessing a centre of judgement that has not been entirely borrowed from the crowd, ideology, or political authority. Someone who has never clarified personal values can more easily adjust language and conduct under pressure in order to preserve safety, belonging, or prestige. Saying no is therefore a political capacity before it becomes heroic action; it is cultivated through ordinary habits of honesty.

The example of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s final public speech illustrates how a small rupture in silence can acquire collective force. One person voices opposition within the assembled crowd and the regime’s image of unanimous consent begins to crack. *Dead Poets Society* offers a parallel image: one student stands on the desk before others find the courage to follow. These examples do not imply that every act of refusal is automatically virtuous. Their point is that truth sometimes needs a first person willing to bear the cost of making dissent publicly visible.

The closing argument aligns with Solzhenitsyn’s injunction not to live by lies. An individual may be unable to prevent every falsehood from entering the world or guarantee that truth will prevail. One can nevertheless decide not to become a conduit for the lie. That apparently modest commitment is the core of what the seminar calls the courage of being one person: not a fantasy of moral purity or theatrical heroism, but a willingness to preserve one’s relation to truth when assent would be easier, safer, and more rewarding.