Jeff Groom summarizes the great Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s speech to Harvard forty years ago today in this article along with a video of the whole: 40 Years Ago Today: When Solzhenitsyn Schooled Harvard.

“Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of,” Solzhenitsyn said, “everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames.”

Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and in such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the debased sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades. (In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to this end imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to carefully conceal such feelings. This active and tense competition comes to dominate all human thought and does not in the least open a way to free spiritual development.)

Groom writes, “In the pre-modern worldview that ended with the Renaissance, mankind was inherently evil and had to be made better. But following these harsh times, he noted, ‘we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal.’”