INDIVIDUALISM AND BETRAYAL

To the Editors of the Harvard CRIMSON:

Discussing the implications of the Fifth Amendment, the professors state that. "The underlying principle to remember in considering the subject is the duty of the citizen to cooperate in government." Since the authors do not qualify the statement, I assume this duty to apply to all government and all conditions. If we would have a communist government tomorrow, our new leaders would find such an interpretation of the citizen's duty very handy, and so would any totalitarian government. This is why we should not be surprised to find both nazis and communists proposing international agreements and laws making non-cooperation in government an offense to be prosecuted not only by the home state of the citizen but also by the host state into which he may have escaped. The United States discovered in the nick of time the sinister implication of a soviet sponsored United Nations proposal to this effect. But fifteen years earlier, many nations signed without any scruples a similar series of agreements--the so-called Gestapo Pacts--with Germany.

In a democracy it is less a duty of the citizen to cooperate with government than a duty of the government to cooperate with the citizen. It is they who are masters as we can see from the fact that whenever government refuses to cooperate with the citizens, it is not the citizens who are eliminated but the government. It is therefore not without significance that the most characteristic feature of democracy is not cooperation but opposition which in the eyes of government always looks like obstruction.

Certainly, a citizen must stand the punishment society prescribes, if for no other reason than that he has no chance of escaping it anyway. But this is not the issue. The issue is: Should he, merely because the law, has no regard for sportsmanship, violgate his own superior standard as a sportsman and a gentleman?

This is what nazism and communism demand, and what our won a increasingly collectivized society seems to demand in increasing measure too. However, it is not only totalitarian but indecent, if the judgment of society becomes the standard by which an individual is judged also by those with whom he is connected not socially but personally, and by more intimate bonds than those of citizenship. For the fact that someone is a law defying. citizen does not mean that he could therefore not at the same time be the best of fathers, the most perfect of gentlemen, or the most outstanding scholar. The great newspaperman is not the one who divulges before Court the identify of his inform auis but the one who rather goes to jail in defense of the superior principles of his profession. The good priest is not the one who betrays the confidence entrusted to him in confession as his "duty to collaborate with government" would prescribe, but the one who following the superior code of his Church would rather die. Those whom one has not betrayed should not betray one either. This is the issue confronting not the law but ever dying individualistic civilization. Leopold Kohr   Assistant Professor of Economies   Sutpers University.