This is similar to the Stoic courage to be; and it is in the last analysis Stoicism that underlies this attitude. It is true today as it was in later antiquity that the Stoic attitude, even if appearing in a collectivist form, is the only serious alternative to Christianity. The difference between the genuine Stoic and the neocollectivist is that the latter is bound in the first place to the collective and in the second place to the universe, while the Stoic was first of all related to the universal Logos and secondly to possible human groups. But in both cases the anxiety of fate and death is taken into the courage to be as a part. In the same way the anxiety of doubt and meaningless-ness is taken into neocollectivist courage. The strength of the Communist self-affirmation prevents the actualization of doubt and the outbreak of the anxiety of meaningless-ness. The meaning of life is the meaning of the collective. Even those who live as victims of the terror at the lowest level of the social hierarchy do not doubt the validity of the principles. What happens to them is a problem of fate and demands the courage to overcome the anxiety of fate and death and not the anxiety of doubt and meaningless-ness. In this certainty the Communist looks contemptuously at Western society. He observes the large amount of anxiety of doubt in it, and he interprets this as the main symptom of the morbidity and approaching end of bourgeois society. This is one of the reasons for the expulsion and prohibition of most of the modern forms of artistic expression in the neocollectivist countries, although they have made important contributions to the rise and development of modern art and literature in their last pre-Comoiunist period, and although communism, in its fighting stage, has used their antibourgeois elements for its propaganda.
With the establishment of the collective and the exclusive emphasis on self-affirmation as a part, those expressions of the courage to be as oneself had to be rejected. The neocollectivist is also able to take the anxiety of guilt and condemnation into his courage to be as a part. It is not his personal sin that produces anxiety of guilt but a real or possible sin against the collective. The collective, in this respect, replaces for him the God of judgment, repentance, punishment, and forgiveness. To the collective he confesses, often in forms reminiscent of early Christianity or later sectarian groups. From the collective he accepts judgment and punishment. To it he directs his desire for forgiveness and his promise of self-transformation. If he is accepted back by it, his guilt is overcome and a new courage to be is possible. These most striking features in the Communist way of life can hardly be understood if one does not go down to their ontological roots and their existential power in a system which is based on the courage to be as a part. This description is a typological one, as the descriptions of the earlier forms of collectivism were. A typological description presupposes by its very nature that the type is rarely fully actualized. There are degrees of approxi- mation, mixtures, transitions, and deviations. But it was not my intention to give a picture of the Russian situation as a whole, including the significance of the Greek Orthodox Church, or of the different national movements or of individual dissenters. I wanted to describe the neocollectivist structure and its type of courage, as actualized predominantly in present-day Russia.
