A Joint Session of the U.S. Congress
Washington, D.C., February 21, 1990
Full address available online here. Below is an excerpt:
Ladies and gentlemen,
I've only been president for two months, and I haven't attended any schools for presidents. My
only school was life itself. Therefore, I don't want to burden you any longer with my political thoughts,
but instead I will move on to an area that is more familiar to me, to what I would call the philosophical
aspect of those changes that still concern everyone, although they are taking place in our corner of
the world.
As long as people are people, democracy in the full sense of the word will always be no more
than an ideal; one may approach it as one would a horizon, in ways that may be better or worse, but
it can never be fully attained. In this sense you are also merely approaching democracy. You have
thousands of problems of all kinds, as other countries do. But you have one great advantage: You
have been approaching democracy uninterruptedly for more than 200 years, and your journey toward
that horizon has never been disrupted by a totalitarian system. Czechs and Slovaks, despite their
humanistic traditions that go back to the first millennium, have approached democracy for a mere
twenty years, between the two world wars, and now for three and a half months since the 17th of
November of last year.
The advantage that you have over us is obvious at once.
The Communist type of totalitarian system has left both our nations, Czechs and Slovaks as
it has all the nations of the Soviet Union, and the other countries the Soviet Union subjugated in its
time a legacy of countless dead, an infinite spectrum of human suffering, profound economic decline,
and above all enormous human humiliation. It has brought us horrors that fortunately you have not
known.
At the same time, however unintentionally, of course it has given us something positive:
a special capacity to look, from time to time, somewhat further than someone who has not undergone
this bitter experience. A person who cannot move and live a normal life because he is pinned under
a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped in this way.
What I am trying to say is this: We must all learn many things from you, from how to educate
our offspring, how to elect our representatives, all the way to how to organize our economic life so that
it will lead to prosperity and not poverty. But it doesn't have to be merely assistance from the
well-educated, the powerful and the wealthy to someone who has nothing to offer in return.
We too can offer something to you: our experience and the knowledge that has come from it.
This is a subject for books, many of which have already been written and many of which have
yet to be written. I shall therefore limit myself to a single idea.
The specific experience I'm talking about has given me one great certainty: Consciousness
precedes Being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim.
For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart,
in the human power to reflect, in human humbleness and in human responsibility.
Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the
better in the sphere of our Being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed,
whether it be ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization, will be
unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war or by the danger that the absurd mountains
of accumulated nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitively
won. We are in fact far from definite victory.
We are still a long way from that "family of man;" in fact, we seem to be receding from the
ideal rather than drawing closer to it. Interests of all kinds: personal, selfish, state, national, group and,
if you like, company interests still considerably outweigh genuinely common and global interests. We
are still under the sway of the destructive and thoroughly vain belief that man is the pinnacle of
creation, and not just a part of it, and that therefore everything is permitted. There are still many who
say they are concerned not for themselves but for the cause, while they are demonstrably out for
themselves and not for the cause at all. We are still destroying the planet that was entrusted to us, and
its environment. We still close our eyes to the growing social, ethnic and cultural conflicts in the world.
From time to time we say that the anonymous megamachinery we have created for ourselves no
longer serves us but rather has enslaved us, yet we still fail to do anything about it.
In other words, we still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and
economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our
actions if they are to be moral is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family,
my country, my firm, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where all our actions are
indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged.
The interpreter or mediator between us and this higher authority is what is traditionally referred
to as human conscience.
If I subordinate my political behavior to this imperative, I can't go far wrong. If on the contrary
I were not guided by this voice, not even ten presidential schools with 2,000 of the best political
scientists in the world could help me.
This is why I ultimately decided after resisting for a long time to accept the burden of
political responsibility.
I'm not the first nor will I be the last intellectual to do this. On the contrary, my feeling is that
there will be more and more of them all the time. If the hope of the world lies in human consciousness,
then it is obvious that intellectuals cannot go on forever avoiding their share of responsibility for the
world and hiding their distastes for politics under an alleged need to be independent.
It is easy to have independence in your programme and then leave others to carry out that
programme. If everyone thought that way, soon no one would be independent.
I think that Americans should understand this way of thinking. Wasn't it the best minds of your
country, people you could call intellectuals, who wrote your famous Declaration of Independence, your
Bill of Rights and your Constitution and who above all took upon themselves the practical
responsibility for putting them into practice? The worker from Branik in Prague, whom your president
referred to in his State of the Union message this year, is far from being the only person in
Czechoslovakia, let alone in the world, to be inspired by those great documents. They inspire us all.
They inspire us despite the fact that they are over 200 years old. They inspire us to be citizens.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
powers from the Consent of the Governed," it was a simple and important act of the human spirit.
What gave meaning to that act, however, was the fact that the author backed it up with his life.
It was not just his words, it was his deeds as well.
I will end where I began. History has accelerated. I believe that once again, it will be the
human spirit that will notice this acceleration, give it a name, and transform those words into deeds.
