John Ralston Saul

...delivered a convocation speech at Ottawa U. It's online, and it's pretty good. Go read.

What I am talking about is the huge difference between having a conscious life versus an unconscious life. You can fill in the days, do the jobs, make the money, pay the mortgage, bring up a decent family in a relatively unconscious way and pass on through and probably no one will notice. Socrates laid it out once and for all with his phrase, "the unexamined life is not worth living". That was true before Socrates and it's been true for the last 2,500 years.

Now, some of the professors on the stage might point out that Socrates didn't end up too well. But he was 80 at the time when he decided to drink the hemlock, and it was a conscious choice.

The interesting thing is that 2,500 years later, we're still talking about Socrates. But we don't talk about the people who voted to condemn him to death. We don't really know who they were. We've forgotten most of their names because they carry the dishonour of not having acted as responsible citizens. We tend to erase the names of these sorts of people in the memory of our civilizations. But Socrates is always there, with us, as a central example. Perhaps you would prefer not to have a complicated, tough life. Perhaps you would rather take the easier road. It's your choice. The only thing I can tell you is that those moments of acting with the self-confidence or responsible citizen and those moments of taking the risks of responsible citizen are the moments when you will really be alive, the moments when you will know that you are making your contribution. That is the real loyalty – to your family, to your friends, to your society, to yourselves.