22
PARTISAN REVIEW
selves with the notion that political democratization and economic free–
dom will instantly solve all their problems. Not so. To emerge from the
psychological numbness and the moral demobilization that every collec–
tivist regime propagates among its citizenry - who are obliged to abdi–
cate their sense of individual responsibility, who live with the alienating
assumption that their problems must be resolved by the state in the first
place and only on second thought by themselves - will be a task more
arduous than any of the moving accomplishments of the last few months,
in which we have seen the withering of tyrannies and bureaucracies. For
countries like Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the
Soviet Union itself, the real revolutionary struggle now begins: to con–
struct a free society from the ruins of moribund socialism. For citizens
who are aware that there is no lasting political freedom, much less
progress, without economic liberty, and for whom a market economy
means discipline, this means strict enforcement of the law, risk-taking,
initiative, and, above all, much work and sacrifice. The culture of success
- the source of the extraordinary pro perity that advanced democratic
societies have obtained - includes also, for the people who have busi–
nesses, the possibility of failure and ruination without the state's coming
in to lend a hand, and of having, therefore, to start from scratch after a
failure. To assume freedom entails likewise the acceptance that one must
pay the costs of inefficiency and error. If the free market system generates
the most efficiency and creates more wealth than any other, it is also a
system that is cold and merciless to the inefficient. This is very much to
the point at the threshold of an age in which the possibility of a
humanity without wars, an arms race, or superpower blocks, where the
common denominator of freedom will link most of the world's people,
is taking shape on the horizon. Freedom, always the guarantor of
progress and justice, comes with a high price that people must pay daily
under penalty of losing it. No countries, neither the richest ones nor
those with the greatest democratic traditions, are excused from this peril.
What happened in Eastern Europe is also happening, though in a
more attenuated and far less spectacular way, in Latin America. It is a
slow process, indirect and not always conscious, yet visible to those who
observe without prejudice the continent's recent evolutions. Except for
Cuba and Haiti,
all
of our dictatorships have been replaced by civilian
regimes. Democratic governments - though with varying degrees of
legitimacy - run our countries from the Rio Grande down to the Straits
of Magellan. At the same time, the violent revolutionary myths have lost
for us their force, their capacity to unify our rural people, our young
people, our workers in the way that the violent revolutionary myths
could. These myths, kept alive by certain recalcitrant minorities -
