In 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke at Harvard about the exhausted spirit of the West. He felt that western societies were geniuses at using law, but that the result was a coldness that was eventually crippling: "Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses." I am interested in the hint here that a legal or bureaucratic system will seem to relieve a person or a society of moral judgment. A system that thinks for us, then, maybe even feels our emotions for us, too. In pointing at the West in this essay he suggests that freedom can at times be morally hollow, decadent. I guess that's not too hard to agree with.