| Long since the last time I have read such a touching speech
He spoke out the essence of my thoughts on today's world.
Worth reading, trust me.
I have only taking out part of it, for your conveniences.
Full speech here
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Legalistic Life
Western society has given itself the organization
best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The
limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such
limits are very broad. People in the
West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating
law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to
understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according
to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If
one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may
mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a
willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it
would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of
those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases
an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food
product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make
it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it…….
The Direction of Freedom
……… It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human
obligations.
Destructive
and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense
against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty
for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography,
crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically
counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life
organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against
the corrosion of evil.
And what shall we say about the dark realm of
criminality as such? Legal frames
(especially in the United
States) are broad enough to encourage not
only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can
go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of
public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism,
public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' civil
rights. There are many such cases.
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