When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in
The Gulag Archipelago, "Let the lie come into the world. Let it even triumph. But not through me," that was
based.
Not participating in transparent lies or mass delusion is based. Doing so against the madness of the following crowd is based. Nearly everything that it means to be
based is either contained within or predicated upon this one trait of character.
Solzhenitsyn wrote those words as a result of his observations living in what may have been the most brutal tyranny of human history: Stalin's USSR. That simplest of refusals — the refusal to lie on command, or even to fit in — is, in the end, the summary of his observations of what kind of people had what it took to resist a totalitarian regime.
Keeping your head down while you hope the unconscionable blows over, say, so you can keep your job but none of your dignity, is not based.
Being unwilling to lie, which is to say being based, is what set Solzhenitsyn's various heroes apart from the weakness of character, cowardice, and greed that allowed others to survive, if that's what it can be called. Solzhenitsyn's brilliance was in observing that, in the end, this trait of character —
the willingness to resist lies, be yourself, and tell the truth even when people won't like you (or will kill you) for it — is one of the small number of necessary characteristics to grind true tyranny to a halt.
The other, if you want to know, is laughter. Both of these things, mixed in the right proportions and applied in the right circumstances, make what it means to be based.
Solzhenitsyn's time in the USSR under Josef Stalin was extreme, but it was not unique. China, Cambodia, and other places saw similar, or even perhaps worse, depending how one counts untellable horrors. While "it could never happen here" is a bit of wishful thinking applied to the question of whether the Nazi regime could ever be repeated in the United States,
the ideological conditions and general cowardice that enable these sorts of catastrophes have already come knocking at our door. Their reception has been, from those with the power to answer, troublingly warm.
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