Viggo Mortensen reads Albert Camus' Lecture, "The Human Crisis"

[ancianita]

Key ideas: suffering; learning what the human crisis is; how we change to solve it worldwide; hope

To skip introductions (context), start at 16:22

Full transcript: https://www.scribd.com/document/341261228/The-Human-Crisis-Albert-Camus-Lecture

A communion among men that had to be defended and sustained. With that in mind, we knew how to act and we learned that people, even in situations of absolute moral degradation, can find sufficient values to guide their conduct.

Once people began to realize the truth lay in communicating with each other, and mutual recognition of each other’s dignity, it became clear that this very communication was what had to be served.

To maintain this communication, men needed to be free, since a master and a slave have nothing in common. And one cannot speak and communicate with a slave. Yes, bondage is a silence. The most terrible silence of all. To maintain this communication we had to eliminate injustice because there is no contact between the oppressed and the profiteer. Need is also relegated to silence.

To maintain this communication we had to eliminate lying and violence. For the man who lies closes himself off from other men, and he who tortures and constrains imposes an irrevocable silence. From the negative impetus that was the starting point of our revolt, we drew an ethos of liberty and sincerity. Yes, it was the act of communication that was needed to oppose the murderous world. That’s what we understood going forward, and this communication must be maintained today if we are to protect ourselves from murder.

As we know now, we must fight against injustice, against slavery and terror. Because these three scourges are what makes silence reign among men, what builds barriers between them, what renders them invisible to one another and prevent them from finding the only value that might save them from this desperate world: the extended of man’s struggling against fate.

At the end of this long night, we finally know that what we must do in the face of this crisis torn world.

What must we do? Call things by their name and understand that we kill millions of people each time we agree to think certain thoughts. You don’t think badly because you think you are a murderer, you are a murderer because you think badly. Hence, you can be a murderer without ever having killed, and this is why we are all more or less murderers.

The first thing to do is simply to reject in thought and action any acquiescent or fatalistic way of thinking.

The second thing to do is to unburden the world of the terror that reigns today and prevents clear thought...

The third thing to do, whenever possible, is to put politics back in its true place, a secondary one. We need not furnish the world with a political or moral gospel or catechism. The great misfortune of our time is precisely that politics pretends to provide us with a catechism, with a complete philosophy, and sometimes even with rules for loving. But the role of politics is to keep things in order ...

The fourth thing to be done is to seek out and to create, on the very foundation of our negativity, positive values that will reconcile negative thought with the potential for positive action. That is the work of philosophers, which I have barely touched upon here.

The fifth thing is to fully understand that this attitude means creating a universalism in which all people of good will can come together. To leave solitude behind we must speak. But we must always speak frankly and on all occasions never lie and always say everything we know to be true. But we can only speak a truth in a world in which it is defined and found in values shared by everyone. It isn’t Mr. Hitler who decides what’s true or false. Nobody in this world, now or ever, should have the right to decide that their own truth is good enough to impose on others ... The freedom we must finally win is the freedom not to lie. Only then can we discover our reasons for living and for dying.

So here is where we stand, and I probably took the long way there, but after all the history of mankind is the history of its errors, not its truths. Truth is probably like happiness, simple and without a history ...

We can’t pretend to escape from history for we are in history ... We want only to rediscover the paths to civilization where man, without urning his back on history, will no longer be enslaved by it. With the obligation each person incurs with regard to others will be balanced by time for reflection, pleasure, and the happiness every person owes themselves.

In a situation like ours, optimism seems scandalous.

We know that those of us who are dead today were the best among us, since they appointed themselves. And we who are still living must remind ourselves that we are only alive because we did less than others. And this is why we continue to live a contradiction. The only difference is that this generation can now join this contradiction to an immense hope for humankind ...

I have spoken about have great respect for your humanity and your taste for freedom and happiness, which can be discerned among the faces of great Americans. Yes, they expect from you what they expect of all men of goodwill: a loyal contribution to the spirit of dialogue that they want to infuse the world with.

Our struggles, our hopes, and our demands seen from afar may appear confused or futile to you. And it is true that on the road to wisdom and truth, if there is one, these men have not chosen the straightest or the simplest path. This is because neither the world nor history have offered them anything straghtforward or simple. They are trying to forge with their own hand the secret they could not find in their given condition. And perhaps they will fail. But I am convinced that if they fail, so will the world.

In a Europe still poisoned by violence and deep seated hatred, in a world torn apart by terror, they try to save for mankind what can still be saved. And that is their only ambition. If such an effort can find some expression in France, and if this evening I have been able to give you a faint idea of the passion for justice that inspires all French people, it will be our sole consolation, and my humblest source of pride.

[AnnieBW]

1. Viggo Could Read The Phone Book

And he would still be hot!