THE facts answer

The Real Wall to Knock Out Is Inside Ourselves
Amid hopes and disillusions, from that winter of ’89 a fact emerges: no systems could ever satisfy man’s desire.

by John waters

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard poses an unsettling question: did the Berlin Wall fall in or out? He believes that it “didn’t fall outwards as a mark of openness and freedom, but inwards as a mark of disintegration and of a dismantling that was violent but had no liberatory consequences.”
His theory relates to his wider analysis that the capacity of mass media to scrutinize every event as it happens has frozen history in its tracks. The continuity of instant information has removed the temporal element by which history used to resolve matters as they unfolded. There is no longer a past, present, and future in which meaning can become visible.  Thus, the aftermath of the collapse of Communism was more  a defrosting than a liberation. The hyper-awareness of the peoples of the East of what they had been “missing” resulted not in a spontaneous eruption of freedom, but a mimicking, a catching-up, a recycling of history, a playing out in reverse of 20th-century Western culture. (When I read this recently, I realized it explains why Eastern countries have become so dominant in the Eurovision Song Contest: fast-forwarding through the cultural history they had been soundproofed against, they produce more distilled and flamboyant examples, with which they exhibit a more intense enthusiasm than the Western inventors of pop music can currently muster.)
Baudrillard’s is a strange and challenging theory, which I find myself resisting and yet unable to dismiss.
Twenty years on, I want to celebrate, to feel again the beauty and majesty of those momentous events of the winter of 1989, which for me marked the start of a great adventure of reflecting and being. Soon after the Velvet Revolution, I went to Prague to write about the first free elections. I immersed myself in the writings of the great Czech novelists and playwrights, and of course the powerful essays of the new President of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel.
Something I came across in Havel’s writings is not far removed from what Baudrillard has suggested. Years before the collapse of Communism, Havel wrote that the socialist ideology of the East was merely a convex-mirror image of the capitalism of the West, a slightly exaggerated version of something that relates fundamentally to the perversion of human desire. 
 Yes. The past 18 months have seen the inward collapse of what might be called a Berlin Wall of the market economy, as the systems whose “final victory” we announced two decades ago themselves began to crumble. My celebrations this winter will therefore be nostalgic and joyous, but they will also seek to remember more deeply that, although the human desire for freedom is boundless and indefatigable, it cannot be satisfied by overthrowing one system and gaining access to another.  We may knock down walls in order to meet the insistent demands of our deepest longings, but the answer we seek is not necessarily to be discovered in the ideas of freedom on the other side.