During a recent stay in Moscow, I heard, over and over, conversations that made me shiver. I listened to cheerless pronouncements about how perestroika is failing; about the immanence of conflict, even violence, as the country moves toward local elections in the spring; about slender hopes now weakening amidst a dreary sense of sameness, and an uninspiring lack of concrete results; about the lengthening of lines, further emptying of shelves, and growing disillusionment with new leaders who behave too often like the old.
Surely there is no nation in the world which has had more practice in conditioning itself against hope. And there seems no shortage of practiced, eloquent pessimists today in Moscow. I heard them everywhere—young and old, in the system and out, holding forth in kitchens and meeting rooms alike. For pessimism is the safest, the simplest, the most comfortable and least brave of all paths. If your dire predictions prove correct, then at least you have the comfort of having been right; if perchance you were wrong, this is also not a bad result.
Yet even though I understood, and sympathized with, my friends who wished to be prophets of doom, I still could not listen to their long lists of complaints and grim forecasts without a rising sense of frustration, fear, even anger. I found myself pleading with them not to give in to the seductive temptation of pessimism, not to yield the strength of their thoughts to its easy comforts. But why? They argued. What difference does it make?
There is a principle in human affairs whose causes and reasons are as yet obscurely understood, and yet whose existence cannot be denied: the power of the self-fulfilling prophecy. If enough people believe that a certain future will come to pass, and believe it with sufficient conviction, and structure their lives according to that belief, and proclaim it to all the world with gusto, then in fact that future is more likely to come to pass. In other words, what we believe creates our reality. And so I could not listen calmly to talk of failure, violence, collapse and civil war, because I am sure that if enough people repeat and believe this, then it will in fact happen.
“Nonsense,” replies the pessimist. “We are only being realistic.” But worlds have been lost thanks to the limitation of this terrible word, “realism,” which is only a mask for a lack of courage, the courage to have vision and hope.
I want to say to all Soviets: please do not forget all the miracles that have already taken place, all the new realities now taken for granted that were yesterday’s unrealistic dreams. You can help ward off the siren-song of pessimism if you can keep alive a fresh amazement at the growing honesty of your newspapers, the turbid but dynamic growth of your cooperatives, the brutal accuracy of your long-suppressed self-examination of your history, the vitality of at least some of your political campaigns, the fire and persistence of your new ecological movements, the creativity now unleashed on your film screens, your stages, your canvasses, your printing presses both official and homegrown.
I want you to know that we outside of the Soviet Union are still in shock from the boldness and rapidity of what you have already achieved. Our expectations for you had been ridiculously low; we thought that you might, with difficulty, muster some slight improvements in ten or fifteen years. And thus we tend to judge perestroika rather kindly and to emphasize how much better things are than before. You, on the other hand, have far greater expectations, and far more impatience built up over the years. The absurdities of the past are quickly and gratefully forgotten as normality, or some semblance of it, returns to the realms of politics, arts, media, commerce. And so rather than looking behind you, and saying “thank God those days are gone,” you are impatiently looking ahead, and judging yourselves harshly, by the high standards of the yet underachieved potentials that you know you possess. All of this is completely understandable, and yet somehow you must hold on to an appreciation of what has already been done, and draw from this the hope, power, and endurance that you will need for what must still be done.
I am speaking with urgency, and not only because of my concern for those of you now living in the Soviet Union, but also because the future of your country directly affects my own life, the lives of my children and indeed the lives of everyone on the planet. There is no separation in our destinies. In the next year, your country will be poised on the brink of major transformational change, a delicate and fateful time when the slightest currents of energy, the smallest individual actions, can send history down one slope or another. That is why so many of us from other countries intend to stand by you, to prod and encourage and challenge and assist you, as you enter this period of crisis and opportunity. We are not going away. We are not going to let you forget that what happens to you will affect us all.
And so, please, for your sake and the sake of all of us, do not succumb to the self-fulling prophecy of catastrophe. Deny yourselves the unaffordable luxury of despair. Reach for your strengths, and reach for each other. Think, work, dare, invent, try. When you next hear people proclaim, with hollow humor, that the country is going to the dogs, do not sit and laugh along. Challenge them. Provoke them into thinking of one thing they might do to help. I warn you: you will feel naked and silly, at first, without the protective armor of pessimism. The hopeful path is not an easy path. But are we brave enough to risk hope, to believe in our own power to make change, to create around us a positive and alternative self-fulfilling prophecy? On this question rests the future of the world.