Exceptional condition

“Everywhere man may live, he can also live well.” Marcus Aurelius. This audiobook seeks to answer how to fulfil this quote. Martin M. Šimečka continues: “In all my relatively long life, I have never encountered such a massive wave of evil as is now pouring from the mouths of such a huge number of people, and I include the communist dictatorship in this life experience.” This evil is called fascism and it has the character of a pandemic that attacks the human mind and spreads across the territory of Western civilisation. But do we understand the reasons why fascism is back? And if we do, will it lose its power? How should we think about the people who have given up on reason, and about the silent, passive majority? And is it even necessary to think about them at all? Martin M. Šimečka skilfully moves between memories of life as a dissident, the ideas of historians and writers, and reflections on the nature of evil, on stupidity, defiance and friendship, on the parallel society that creates its own rules and lives independently of the majority, in order to find an answer to the question: how to live a good life in a country that is turning away from democracy?