Stefan Zweig. Photo: Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
On human destructiveness: Jonathan Wooding finds lessons in Stefan Zweig
‘It will be our souls, our honest impartiality, our inner selves, that will guide us to solutions.’
Anxieties over one’s identity and status, one’s human rights and freedom, and sense of belonging, are, at root, fears of human destructiveness. We more or less know that this is true, and that no amount of legislation, police protection and military deterrence is going to get the better of that destructiveness, this streak of cruelty and self-harm, what we might call species-malfunction. But many of us keep trying. We uphold democratic freedoms, draw attention to injustice and abuse, stand with the victim, and pity the inanity of the powerful. We tell ourselves that liberal democracy is faulty, but that it is reasonably successful in reassuring citizens that they may be safe, and may have recourse to justice in the face of arbitrary violence. But as one’s nation state turns increasingly authoritarian, well, one’s confidence recedes. It all thins out our blitheness of spirit, our buoyancy, our self-delighting joie de vivre.
