For what (or whom) are you ready to sacrifice your life? In the year of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, we decided to find out the answer to this question. Numbers and comments.
The possibility of another world war today looks frighteningly real. But these dates (1914-2014) are also an occasion to think about our values, for which we are ready to sacrifice our lives in a critical situation. What are these values and do they exist at all – after all, our pragmatic society tends to completely deny spiritual ideals. “We hasten to classify any attempt at a radical assertion of values alien to us (and self-sacrifice is the most radical of possible gestures) as religious fanaticism,” explains philosopher and psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle. “But a society cannot exist if no one in it is ready to die for the sake of their ideas about life, is not able to pay this price in order to remain human.”
“For whom or for what are you ready to give your life?”
The figures on the left are the proportion of women, on the right – men. The survey was conducted by Tiburon research commissioned by Psychologies. It was attended by 1253 respondents aged 18 to 60 living in cities with a million population.
Are there such people among us today? Our survey showed that three-quarters of Russians are ready to sacrifice their lives for the sake of family and loved ones. Such unanimity can be considered a recognition of the priority of family values. And it can, however, be evidence that there are simply no other values and guidelines in the life of most of us today.
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For faith, the king and the Fatherland. Let’s compare Russian figures with data from other European countries*. In Lithuania, for example, about 45% are ready to give their lives for their family and loved ones, but not one of the more than a thousand respondents is ready to die for their homeland. Among Russians, there are about 10% of such patriots. In the old European democracies, the situation is fundamentally different: one in four Swiss, one in five Frenchmen and one in six Germans is ready to lay down their lives for the country. This figure is even higher in Poland – almost 50%. Poland is also leading in adherence to religious values: almost every third Pole is ready to give his life for faith and God. In Russia, about 1,5% of respondents are ready to die for their faith (for which faith, they did not specify). Approximately the same number are ready to sacrifice themselves for their principles and beliefs – another argument in favor of the fact that faith and principles in Russia today are of value to a very narrow circle. For comparison: in Germany, 44,3% of respondents are ready to pay for their beliefs with their lives, in Switzerland – 48,8%, and in France – 62,3%.
Finally, about 30% of Swiss consider their life too valuable to sacrifice it for the sake of something or someone. Almost the same figure was given by a survey in Germany and France, and in Lithuania the percentage of respondents who did not consider it possible to sacrifice their lives was 42. in the age groups 10–35 and 44–45, 54% and 11,3%, respectively, which, according to psychologist Yevgeny Osin, may indicate a crisis of values experienced by the most active part of the population.
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Conditional mood. However, the wording of the question is too pointed, and therefore the results should be treated with some caution, Evgeny Osin believes: “Respondents are well aware that we are not talking about a real situation. Therefore, their answers can be quite conditional.” At the same time, polls also record an important result: the very idea of “giving one’s life” today seems unreasonable to many people. “In the light of the humanistic ideas on which modern Western society is based and which postulate human rights as the highest value, self-sacrifice is really not a very reasonable act. After all, any life is valuable, including our own, and if you sacrifice it, then only if for the sake of saving someone else’s life. At the same time, as a rule, close relatives are supposed to be rescued, which is confirmed by the popularity of this answer option in all surveys, ”explains Evgeny Osin.
Revisiting values. It is obvious that today the proportion of those who are ready to give their lives for their Motherland is rather insignificant. The unwillingness to sacrifice oneself is analyzed in the works of the sociologist Christian Welzel, who proceeds from the fact that as humanity develops, life is increasingly turning from a source of unhappiness and suffering into a source of opportunities for prosperity and self-realization. For this reason, values are being revised, and fewer people are ready to give up their lives even in the name of the highest ideals. The main factor in this development Welzel calls the right of the individual to free self-expression (emancipative values). In his opinion, they are realized to the maximum extent in democratic countries with a high standard of living, tolerance and a subjective sense of well-being. It is the inhabitants of such countries who are least of all inclined to sacrifice their lives, including participating in wars.
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Last year, Welzel and his colleague Ronald Inglehart conducted an extensive study that confirmed the validity of these assumptions **. In particular, on the basis of numerous surveys, a kind of rating of the states of the world was compiled according to the degree of readiness of their population to participate in the war. The first place in it was occupied by Qatar, which, despite good economic indicators, is not distinguished by democracy, tolerance or a high degree of personal freedom. It is natural that among the leaders there is a list of such countries as Vietnam, Rwanda and Bangladesh, where over 95% of the population express their readiness to participate in the war. And the least belligerent are the inhabitants of Germany, Spain and Japan (from 25 to 35%).
However, alas, no theory is capable of guaranteeing the impossibility of a repetition of wars. In the aforementioned rating of 82 states, Russia took only 43rd place, and Ukraine – even 69th …
* In Lithuania, a similar survey was conducted by the Spinter tyrimai company commissioned by the DELFI information portal, and in a number of European countries by the Radio France radio station and its partners.
** See the article “Reinventing the Kantean Peace: the Emerging Mass Basis of Global Security” on the website of the Higher School of Economics hse.ru