How to Keep Your Moral Compass
9 min read
Nearly every major pro-democracy activist in Hong Kong was sentenced last month to a multiyear prison term. The 45 defendants had helped organize a makeshift primary in 2020 to determine who among them would run in legislative elections—basic participatory citizenship that, to the Chinese authorities, was seen as a “conspiracy to commit subversion.” The activists’ error, it seems, was behaving as if they actually lived in a democracy.
In the 1970s, the writer Andrei Amalrik characterized the secret power of his fellow dissidents in the Soviet Union: “They did something simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.”
Recent examples of people acting out of this same humble presumption—and being slapped down for it—are abundant. In just the past few weeks, a 75-year-old Algerian novelist was detained for expressing opinions that were thought to be “endangering the nation”; a Thai human-rights lawyer had two years added to his existing 14-year prison term for writing a letter to the king that apparently violated the country’s “royal defamation law”; the police in Belarus, ahead of the presidential election in January, held 100 relatives of political prisoners out of fear that they might speak. And we haven’t even gotten to Iran, Russia, or North Korea.
These contemporary dissidents share a mindset, what Václav Havel once called an “existential attitude.” They did not wake up one day and decide to take on the regimes of their countries. They just allowed themselves to be guided by their own individuality—an Iranian woman who decides to no longer wear a hijab, a Uyghur teacher who tries to share his people’s history—and collided with societies that demanded conformity and obedience. Dissidents are born out of this choice: either assert their authentic selves or accept the authoritarian’s mafioso bargain, safety and protection in exchange for keeping one’s head down. Those rare few who just can’t make that bargain—they transform into dissidents.
The equation is simple: The more authoritarianism in the world, the more dissidents. And we are undeniably in an authoritarian moment. According to a report last year by the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, when it comes to global freedom, we have returned to a level last seen in 1986. About 5.7 billion people—72 percent of the world’s population—now live under authoritarian rule. Even the United States, vaunted beacon of democracy, is about to inaugurate a president who openly boasts of wanting to be a “dictator on day one,” who regularly threatens to jail his opponents and sic the military on the “enemy within,” and who jokes about his election being the country’s last.
You don’t need to believe that Donald Trump is planning Gulags to see why those who resisted the repressive regimes of the 20th century, as well as those who fight all over the world today, might be worth paying attention to. When Havel talked about an existential attitude, he was describing a fervent sense that certain fundamental principles matter, and that even if a society begins to degrade and devalue those ideals, abandoning them, for these people, is not an option. Many Americans understand today what political exhaustion and complacency look and feel like. But the dissident is the one who hopes against hope.
The modern template for the dissident emerged in the postwar Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc satellites. After Stalin’s death in 1953, expressing discomfort with one’s place in the Communist paradise was no longer necessarily fatal, and a new underclass of pariahs—many poets and scientists among them—became a subversive force. One misconception about the Soviet dissidents is that they were revolutionaries; they were not, for the most part. They did not have a political project. They wanted to live authentically in societies that asked them constantly to lie. If their country was supposed to be one of laws, then they demanded that it abide by those laws. If there were obligations to uphold human and civil rights—like those mandated by the Helsinki Accords signed by the Soviet Union in 1975—those should be respected. The ideology behind this approach, to the extent that there was one, went by a particularly unsexy name: legalism. What angered these objectors to no end was the idea that they should look the other way, which is what the majority of people—for their own self-preservation—did.
I asked Benjamin Nathans, the author of To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, a comprehensive new history of the Soviet dissident movement, for a psychological profile of those who were pulled into this struggle. They are people who “don’t want to be versions of themselves that they can’t live with,” he told me. A certain literalism to their thinking can also make them real pains to deal with. They have an immovable, almost Manichean sense of right and wrong. In Patriot, the recent memoir from Alexei Navalny, a Russian dissident from our own era, the matter-of-factness of his position is almost shocking. Asked again and again why he would return to Vladimir Putin’s Russia after he was nearly killed by poisoning in 2020, sure to face imprisonment and possibly death (which he did, ultimately dying in a prison colony), Navalny expressed annoyance with the question. “By coming back to Russia, I fulfilled my promise to the voters,” he wrote. “There needed to be some people in Russia who don’t lie to them.” That’s it.
Nathans also pointed to another peculiar aspect of the dissident’s personality, “a blend of boldness and despair in the same mind and the same person.” Such people lived in circumstances where change felt impossible, at least within their lifetime. And yet they didn’t give up. “Dissidents have a remarkable ability to appreciate the hopelessness of what they’re trying to accomplish, but persevere nonetheless,” Nathans said. “They don’t treat hopelessness as a reason to be cynical or passive or do things that are just purely performative and symbolic.”
The most perceptive theorizer of the dissident personality was Havel, who wrote about what resistance meant to him in his remarkable 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless.” The battle lines, as he saw them, ran through every individual: Do you acquiesce to “living within the lie,” or do you want to “live within the truth”? Doing the latter did not mean going to the barricade; it simply meant choosing your own existence. Havel pointed out that in Czechoslovakia, the dissident movement had its breakout moment during the trial of a rock band, the Plastic People of the Universe, whose popularity was seen as a threat. On the one side, Havel wrote, was the “sterile puritanism” of the regime and, on the other, “unknown young people who wanted no more than … to play the music they enjoyed.” Dissidence arose from heeding “life, in its essence,” which “moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, and self-organization.”
The denial of life, as Havel understood it, can come about not only through accomodation—as a reasonable trade-off for more comfort—but as a result of cynicism, a feeling that nothing is worth sacrificing for. In the weeks since the U.S. presidential election, I’ve heard variations on the sentiment that, as Timothy Snyder put it in his recent book, On Freedom, “everything is shit.” This resignation is almost as deadly as repression to the ability to “live within the truth” that Havel extolled. Snyder wrote, “If we accept that ‘everything is shit,’ if nothing is any better than anything else, we have no basis for sovereign choices, and gain no practice in the building of a self. We will mutter under our breath and accept our place in a system.”
What dissidents teach us is not to normalize. Just look at the Republican Party’s radically shifting attitudes about Trump to understand how easily this can happen. Leaders who were once worried enough to publicly call the former and future president out as a “reprehensible” (J. D. Vance) “con artist” (Marco Rubio) who had “discredited the American experiment with self-governance” (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) are now his closest advisers and legitimizers.
Crossing the rubicon that Havel described, thinking and acting in ways consistent with one’s true self, involves blocking out the system of rewards and punishments that every society offers its members. Effort is required to become adept at what the Soviet poet (and exiled dissident) Joseph Brodsky once called “the science of ignoring reality,” seeing through the transactional and provisional surface of life to the meaningful depths of principle.
Dissidents are not just sitting behind glass waiting to be broken in case of emergency; they are keeping at bay the forces of repression and conformity as they exist in the world, right now. This is how Masih Alinejad sees it. She is the Iranian dissident who, for her feminist activism, was nearly kidnapped, and twice targeted for assassination by Iran (the second time in a plot that also targeted Trump). “The Islamic Republic of Iran tried to assassinate me on U.S. soil,” Alinejad told me. “Russian dissidents face poison in exile. These regimes are no longer satisfied with suppressing dissent at home; they are exporting their repression. Dissidents, then, are on the front lines of defending not just our countries but the global idea of freedom.”
For this reason, she helped create the World Liberty Congress—basically an Avengers team of dissidents. Alinejad leads the group alongside Garry Kasparov of Russia and Leopoldo López of Venezuela. “Democracies thrive on accountability, and we remind them that turning a blind eye to authoritarianism abroad invites it to take root at home,” she said. “The Iranian regime’s assault on me, a dissident in exile, is not just a personal vendetta; it’s a message to the world that no one is safe.”
Her stance reveals bravery of another order—a man sat outside her home with an AK-47—but I also like Havel’s reminder about what really motivates dissidents. They are outliers not because they run toward oppositional views but because they simply insist on pursuing their interests, their curiosities, their desires and unique ways of being human. It’s in the way Alinejad wears her hair like a plume, with a bright flower sticking out among the wild curls. As Snyder told me when I spoke with him this fall as part of The Atlantic Festival, “The things that you truly love say something about you [that] is irreducible. There’s no math to it. And so that’s what freedom is. Freedom is the ability to know what those things are, find other people who like them, go into the world and somehow realize them.”
I thought about these words recently while perusing the Instagram account of Kianoosh Sanjari. He was a prominent Iranian dissident who jumped to his death last month from a building in central Tehran, protesting the continued imprisonment of four political activists, locked up, he wrote, “for expressing their opinions.” Sanjari himself first got into trouble with the regime as a high-school student for his blogging, and was thrown into an adult prison and placed in solitary confinement. After a two-year sentence, he escaped Iran in 2007 and then lived in the United States. In 2016, he returned to take care of his sick mother, thinking enough time had passed that the authorities would not bother him. But he was arrested shortly after he set foot back in the country and spent the next five years in prison, much of it in and out of psychiatric wards, given electroshock therapy and kept sedated.
This is the kind of tragedy that many dissidents endure—though Sanjari’s suicide is a particularly devestating end after two decades of fighting back. But on his Instagram account, I saw something else, an intensity for life as he wanted to live it, that was surely at the source of his resistance. He appears tall, with a boyish face, often dressed in a dapper suit and a thin tie, smiling. He posted photos of nature. In one video he is walking by the ocean with an excited retriever. Another is a closeup of a rose shivering on a branch during a snowstorm. Underneath one photo, of red tulips, he quotes Hermann Hesse (“Happiness is a how, not a what. A talent, not an object”).
In the moments before he died, Sanjari posted on X his last written words, which were also something of a creed: “My life will end after this tweet but let’s not forget that we die and die for the love of life, not death.”
