A community may survive for a very long time without necessarily maturing in its capacities as time passes on and on. Survival and resilience demonstrate vitality; maturity demands something more: the capacities to look critically at oneself, to place limits on power, to accommodate differences, to correct mistakes, and to transform painful experiences into strategies for building out a better future.
If the preceding Parts I and II sought to identify the resources that enabled the Vietnamese people to survive through repeated cycles of disruption, the question now changes: will the abilities that enabled us to survive for so long be sufficient to help us mature? A historical community becomes a civilizational activist not because it possesses a very long past, but because it can now intentionally and responsibly choose its future, in having institutions that allow its people to learn from their own mistakes.
13. FROM COMMUNITY PERSISTENCE TO SOCIAL MATURITY
In Vietnamese history, survival was never easy. Vietnam’s geopolitical position, centuries of Chinese domination, wars, partitions, natural disasters, and repeated changes in the regional geo-politics have shaped a community with a remarkable capacity for endurance. Yet precisely here a misalignment emerges: qualities that are highly effective for survival under dangerous circumstances are not necessarily sufficient for building a self-sustaining, developed, society in peacetime.
Fernand Braudel helped historians look beyond the surface of events to recognize the structures of the longue durée—the long duration of history. For Vietnam, this perspective is particularly useful. Beneath changing dynasties, regimes, and wars, more persistent structures can be discerned: family and village, a psychology of adaptation, the capacity to absorb external influences and then Vietnamize them, and a powerful determination not to succumb to otherness.
But longevity by itself does not necessarily produce maturity. A tree that has lived for a thousand years may demonstrate extraordinary roots; this does not necessarily mean that it can grow new branches suited to a changed climate. Trần Đình Hượu, in examining Vietnam’s journey “from tradition to modernity,” placed tradition as living within modernity rather than treating it as a treasure chest to be occasionally opened merely for admiration. Such an approach helps today’s Vietnamese avoid two opposing extremes: inferiority before the West and complacent pride in our past accomplishments.
Comparisons with other ancient civilizations makes the point clearly. Persia passed through successive civilizational layers: from ancient antiquity and the Achaemenid Empire through the Hellenistic era, the arrival of Islam, the Mongols, the frise of the Safavids, and now a modern Iran. China likewise experienced repeated dynastic changes, foreign conquest, fragmentation, and reunification. The past of a community, therefore, cannot in itself be used as a measure of its current political or civilizational maturity.
To place Vietnam in this broader historical scale is not to diminish the vigor and accomplishments of its thousands of years of moral and intellectual endeavors . On the contrary, consideration of scope frees us from the need to use history i as proof of contemporary value. More important than having lived in community for a long time is what the present descendants of such a community have learned from their past. A mature community does not remember only its victories; it is also capable of looking at defeats, mistakes, and opportunities that were missed.
Here we need to make a fundamental distinction between a consciousness of having been resilient and a consciousness of being civilizational. The memory of survival The consciousness of resilience usually asks: Who threatened us? How did we resist? Who were our heroes? Where were the victories? Civilizational consciousness brings to mind more uncomfortable questions: After victory, what happened to society? How did ordinary people live? Was power disciplined? Did talent gain opportunity? Was there a place for those who thought differently? A community may be exceptionally capable of mobilizing itself to overcome danger and yet remain uncertain when facing the more ordinary but more difficult task of constructing the institutions that allow human persons to develop excellence in times of peace.
This distinction helps explain a conundrum often found in the histories of nations that have lived for long periods under external threat. External danger easily creates internal unity; but once that danger passes the natural diversities within a society reappear. Skills that were once useful—unity of will, obedience to command, suspicion of difference—can become obstacles if they continue to be prioritized once the danger has passed. A peacetime society requires negotiation, competition, experimentation, the acceptance of error, and the ability to correct error. The strength of a tree required to remain standing in a storm is not the capacity to grow taller under a clear sky.
This is also where literature can express what chronicles often cannot. Nguyễn Trãi left behind not only a proclamation of victory but also poems about loneliness, human relationships, and the vicissitudes of life. Nguyễn Du saw history through the fate of human beings crushed between power and destiny. By the twentieth century, war and revolution had generated more reservoirs of memory: Hữu Loan, Văn Cao, Trần Dần, and Quang Dũng in the North; Nhất Linh, Võ Phiến, Nguyễn Mộng Giác, andother voices from the South or the post-1975 diaspora, which spoke out about very different experiences. They cannot all be included in in only one ideological metaphor , but they can be read as social sensors registering the shocks of history.
Literature thus adds a necessary dimension to historical interpretation. History may document when a policy was introduced, where a battle took place, or how many people participated in a migration. Literature, though, can show how a historical event entered the human soul. One approach seeks the factual truth of events; the other preserves the truth of how those events were experienced. A nation that reads only the official documents written by victors will overlook half of what is remembered; but a nation that lives only with remembered traumas will find it difficult to escape its history.
Civilizational maturity for the Vietnamese today, therefore, does not require rejecting those qualities that once enabled Vietnam to successfully endure. The need is for their transformation. Communal solidarity needs to become civic responsibility; passive adaptability needs to become inventive creativity; patriotism needs to protect both territory and human dignity; tight cohesion in the face of foreign invasion needs to become a more flexible capacity for cooperation within society’s diversity . Tradition then ceases to be an anchor that keeps the ship stationary and becomes part of the map by which the ship sets its course.
Thus, the transition from Resilient Continuity to Civilizational Maturity begins with changing the question to be asked. We should no longer ask only what forces the nation resisted in order to survive, but also to what extent Vietnamese people have or have not been enabled to become individuals with dignity, judgment, responsibility, and the right to participate in decisions affecting their own lives. At this point, the question of what is the nation confronts the question of who is a citizen.
14. INTELLECTUALS AND THE “FIFTH FRONT” MAKING VIETNAMESE HISTORY TODAY
Vietnamese history is often spoken of as having been made by the actions of various “fronts” – military, diplomatic, economic, or political. Yet there is another, though less visible,front: the struggle between institutional power and society’s power expressed through self-reflection. On this front, intellectuals are not necessarily always opponents of institutional power. Their role – a very important one, is to articulate what institutions cannot see about themselves—or do not wish to hear.
Chu Văn An with his Seven Beheadings Petition, Nguyễn Trường Tộ with his reform memorials, and Phan Châu Trinh with his advocacy of raising the people’s intellectual level became advocates in very different historical circumstances. What was common to all three was not a common platform for reform but an attitude: the belief that patriotism does not require an intellectual to agree with the thinking and priorities of an existing administrative order. On the contrary, responsibility toward the community may sometimes require intellectuals to point out limitations implicit in how that community functions
The twentieth century pushed this tension to a much sharper level. In 1956, following the mistakes of the Land Reform, the jurist Nguyễn Mạnh Tường presented before the Fatherland Front his paper Through the Mistakes of the Land Reform: Building a Conception of Leadership. Important in his text is not merely his criticism of a particular political program. He searched for determining causes of dysfunction situated within the mechanisms of leadership and raised probing questions regarding legality, responsibility, the control of power, and the conditions necessary to prevent similar mistakes from recurring.
At almost the same time, Trần Đức Thảo approached the problem of institutional shortcomings through philosophy. In The Social Content and the Form of Freedom, he criticized the maladies of “bureaucratism, commandism, dogmatism, factionalism, and the cult of personality,” while highlighting individual freedom for its contribution to a citizen’s capacity to contribute to community.
If the first spoke through the language of Law, and the second through the language of Philosophy, Hữu Loan and other poets of the same generation raised concerns at the deeper level of human experience. From this approach, concepts such as class, revolution, victory, and error ceased to be merely political terms; they passed through the realities of family, death, love, fear. Literature cannot prove an event in the manner of historical scholarship, but it preserves the part of history that statistics cannot: what real human persons felt as history made itself part of their lives.
These three languages—Law, Philosophy, Poetry—can therefore be read as three levels – each in a different way – responding to the demands of self-reflection. Law asks how far power may go. Philosophy asks how free the individual can be within a community. Poetry asks what remains of our humanity after great systems have encapsulated our lives . None is sufficient alone; taken together, they show that a society can mature only when it uses multiple languages by which to question and understand itself.
Viewed more broadly, this is not uniquely Vietnamese. In the history of many societies, important turning points begin when a question previously whispered only within a narrow circle is able to enter public space. The progress of a civilization therefore cannot be measured only by the number of universities, research institutes, or academic degrees. It must also be measured by the distance between what intellectuals know and what they are permitted to say, between the knowledge available within society and the ability of that knowledge to influence public decisions.
When that gap becomes too great, an invisible form of waste appears. Those with knowledge learn to remain silent; those with decision-making authority receive progressively less truthful information. The institutional machinery may continue to operate, reports may remain complete, yet the systemic capacity to learn withers away. At this point, academic freedom, freedom of debate, and the ability to criticize cease to be luxuries for intellectuals. They add value to the cognitive infrastructure of a nation that is searching for Maturity.
South Vietnam before 1975 provides a relevant experience. The educational philosophy articulated at the National Education Congress of 1958 centered on three principles: Humanism – Nationalism – Liberalism, which subsequently became the foundations for defining the objectives and methods of education in the Republic of Vietnam. There is no need to idealize that educational system in order to recognize it as a legacy worthy of study within the broader history of Vietnamese education.
The recollections of Associate Professor Nguyễn Kim Hồng are particularly noteworthy because he came from the North and was assigned to the Ho Chi Minh City University of Education after 1975. He recalled his surprise at the scale of Saigon, its physical facilities, the qualifications of some lecturers in the social sciences, and the behavior of Southern students; he particularly emphasized the importance attached by families and schools to manners and individual values. This is a personal recollection, not a measurement of two educational systems as a whole, but precisely for that reason it has value as a particular perspective from someone who directly experienced the transition from one structure of mindfulness to another.
More important than such a comparison is the way a society treats what it inherits. After a communal war, the victorious side does not merely take over territory, government offices, schools, or libraries; it confronts a more difficult choice: how should it deal with the intellectual capital created by the other side? One can reject an opposing political regime without rejecting all the knowledge produced under that regime. One can change a system without necessarily beginning again from a ground zero.
At the civilizational level, the capacity to inherit can sometimes be more important than the capacity to break with the past. Meiji Japan did not become Western simply because it learned Western science, law, and technology; it sought to absorb new instruments into a society that remained deeply conscious of its own identity. Many civilizations developed through similar acts of borrowing. The Romans learned from the Greeks; medieval Europe recovered much of the classical legacy through Arab scholars; East Asia adopted Chinese characters and Buddhism and then transformed them in very different ways. Civilizations do not grow by remaining untouched; they grow through the capacity to digest what comes from elsewhere.
Placing these different Vietnamese experiences side by side is not intended to decide whether North was better than South or South better than North. Historical interpretation should ask a different question: after internal political ruptures, is a people capable of preserving the intellectual capital created on both sides? If a new regime accepts only what confirms its own legitimacy and rejects what belonged to the defeated side, the ultimate loss is not borne only by the defeated. It becomes a loss to the common civilizational capital of the nation.
A mature nation therefore not only needs intellectuals, but something more difficult: institutions capable of listening to intellectuals. If criticism is honored only after the critic has died, such rehabilitation of the once excluded may possess moral value but it has not yet created a systemic capacity for self-correction. The measure of maturity is not how many courageous truth-tellers a society produces, but how many mechanisms it builds so that those who tell the truth do not have to pay a price for speaking out honesty.
15. FROM THE POWER TO MOBILIZE TO THE POWER TO DEVELOP
In war and revolution, the capacity for mobilization can determine survival. It concentrates resources, simplifies commands, and turns millions of individuals into a common force. Twentieth-century Vietnam demonstrated the particular effectiveness of this model. Yet success under emergency conditions can itself create inertia: methods that were effective in winning wars may be extended into peacetime, even though civilizational development requires a different logic.
A developmental state is not weaker than a mobilizational state. It is strong in a different sense. Its strength lies not in issuing as many commands as possible, but in establishing stable rules of the game, providing public goods, ensuring accountability, receiving bad news, and correcting policy before mistakes become crises. Montesquieu saw limits on power as a condition for protecting liberty; Hayek warned of the limits of centralized knowledge. These different intellectual traditions meet in one intuition: no center of power can know everything that society knows.
The problem of knowing what is best to know lies not only in excessive power but also in the smallness of centralized knowledge compared with the complexity of life. A fishing village knows things about its waters that a central authority cannot know; a business understands its market; a teacher knows the students; a doctor knows the patient; a locality understands characteristics that a general regulation cannot fully anticipate. A modern state cannot accurately replace on its own all this dispersed knowledge. Its best use lies in connecting and so collecting it, establishing the rules of the game, and changing those rules when reality demonstrates that they are wrong.
The concentration of power and the concentration of intelligence are therefore two different things. Power can be centralized very quickly; the intelligence of a society cannot. When the two are confused, decision-makers can easily fall into the illusion that the authority to decide also implies the ability to know what is right. A mature institutional system must do the opposite: the greater the power held by decision-makers, the more they need independent sources of information, mechanisms of verification, and opportunities to hear things they would rather not hear.
Vietnam’s history after the war shows that the capacity for self-adjustment on the part of Vietnamese has emerged when pressures become sufficiently strong. Đổi Mới in 1986 was not a rejection of the entire past, but an acknowledgment that certain old management mechanisms no longer corresponded to reality. In foreign affairs, Politburo Resolution No. 13 of May 1988, developed with an important role played by Nguyễn Cơ Thạch, is often regarded as a significant shift that helped Vietnam gradually escape isolation and move toward diversified and multilateral external relations.
What deserves attention in this case is not the rise and fall of an individual. More important is the fact that an idea can survive longer than the political position of the person who proposed it. Vietnam subsequently joined ASEAN, normalized relations with the United States, and broadened its international integration. Those developments had many causes and many actors, but they demonstrate that when national interests are interpreted through a framework broader than ideology, the country’s room for maneuver also expands.
Economic reform contains a similar lesson. Forms of agricultural contracting that arose from local practice before becoming broader policy suggest that innovation can sometimes move upward from below before receiving official recognition from above. The important issue here is not to determine who first had the idea, but to recognize a pattern: practice often discovers the limits of dogma before official theory is ready to acknowledge them. A system capable of learning is one that shortens the interval between these two moments.
Conversely, every highly centralized system encounters an information conundrum. The more subordinates fear making mistakes, the more likely information traveling upward will appear more favorable than the reality; the more leaders need to know the truth, the stronger the incentives within the bureaucracy to conceal what the leaders do not wish to hear. This is not merely a problem of personal morality. It is a problem of institutional design: how can disturbing information best reach the place where decisions are made without the person carrying that information forward being disciplined for disloyalty or incompetence?
Experience around the world shows that major institutional failures often begin not because information is unavailable but because information cannot reach the place where it is needed. An organization may employ thousands of experts and still make poor decisions if experts understand that telling their superiors what they do not wish to hear will harm them. Conversely, debate may sometimes slow decisions, but it can also prevent mistakes whose costs may last for decades.
Self-correction must therefore be institutionalized. Correcting a bad policy after ten years is still better than never correcting it, but a mature society requires mechanisms that identify mistakes early on: investigative journalism, scientific debate, the necessary degree of judicial independence, accountability of public authorities, and legitimate channels through which citizens can criticize policy. Such institutions do not weaken the state; they reduce the price that both state and society must pay for informational blindness.
Education is part of the same structure. An educational system mainly designed to train students to find the “correct answer” can produce people more skilled at adapting to the system rather than acting as thoughtful citizens capable of questioning it. Mature education does not teach students to doubt everything, but it should teach them to distinguish evidence from assertion, authority from truth, and disagreement from betrayal. A society that seeks innovation while resisting independent thought encounters a paradox: it wants new inventions but remains uncomfortable with new questions.
At a deeper level, a developmental state must move from viewing society as an object of administration to recognizing society as a source of developmental energy. Businesses, universities, professional associations, local communities, creative circles, and individual citizens are not merely units waiting for policy. They are places where knowledge, initiatives, and solutions are generated—solutions that no central authority can design in their entirety. The more the state can open space for these sources of energy, the less national strength depends upon a single center.
The transition from mobilizing power to developmental power, therefore, is not a transition from a “strong state” to a “weak state.” It is a transition from the strength of command to the strength of communal capacity, from the ability to make society comply to the ability to create conditions in which society can develop itself. A mature nation needs a state strong enough to protect the common interest, but also confident enough to accept that the collective intelligence of the nation is always greater than the factional intelligence of the apparatus.
16. THREE VIETNAMS: MEMORY, TRUTH, AND A NATION NOT YET FULLY RECONCILED
There can be no maturity if memory belongs only to the victors. Yet reconciliation cannot be built simply by reversing the monopoly of memory—replacing the history of the victorious side with the history of the other side. What is needed is a space in which once-opposing memories can coexist without one memory having to prohibit the other.
Twentieth-century Vietnam consisted of more memory zones than two geographical regions. After the war, we can imagine at least three spaces of memory: the memory of those whose lives were associated with the 1945 revolution and the victory of 1975; the memory of those who lived under the Republic of Vietnam and subsequently experienced defeat, re-education, loss, or departure; and the memory of generations born after 1975, both inside Vietnam and overseas, who bear no direct responsibility for the conflict but nevertheless inherit its stories. These “three Vietnams” are not three countries. They are three regions of a national memory that have not yet fully merged one with the others.
The concept of collective memory helps us understand why a war may end militarily without ending in the life of the mind. Maurice Halbwachs showed that memory does not reside only in individuals; it is maintained within families, communities, and social groups. Memory can therefore be transmitted across generations. A person born after an event can still inherit its pain, pride, or prejudice through parental stories, school textbooks, cemeteries, commemorative days, songs, and even through those things about which a family chooses not to speak.
Memoirs from all sides should therefore be read not as final verdicts but as windows. Trần Quang Cơ’s recollections of Vietnamese diplomacy, different reflections by Southern intellectuals, memoirs of those who served the Republic of Vietnam, memories of regrouped Southern officers and officials, those sent to re-education camps, and the stories of boat people, all contain different parts of the truth. Mature historical interpretation does not require them to be identical; excellent history must verify each source and seek to understand why the same event generated such different memories.
This also requires us to distinguish historical truth from historical memory. Historical truth requires documentation, comparison, and verification. Memory may be wrong about a date yet entirely truthful about a sense of fear; it may be partial in its interpretation of an event while accurately reflecting the state of mind of a community. Memory should not replace historical evidence; neither should it be excluded from history merely because it is subjective. Maturity means being capable of placing these two levels in dialogue and in parallel with one another.
Văn Cao offers an especially painful example. In the poem My Comrade, written in the context of the Land Reform, the man being led to his death continues to affirm his political identity. The value of the poem lies not in replacing the historical record of a specific case, but in the spiritual paradox it preserves: a human being can remain loyal to an ideal even when the apparatus acting in the name of that ideal causes him suffering. Literature here becomes the memory of a gray zone, where a victim and a believer in the revolution can be the same person.
That “gray zone” is particularly important for historical interpretation. Political history often divides people into distinctly different categories: revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, victor or defeated, right or wrong. Real life is far more complicated. Some people love their country but disagree with its government; some once stood on one side but later served a reunified country; some left Vietnam yet devoted their lives to Vietnamese culture; and some fought on the victorious side but later looked back upon parts of their experience with pain. If historical interpretation cannot accommodate these gray zones, it may make the recorded facts of history easier to understand, but it impoverishes the human beings who lived through it.
After 1975, the question moved to another scale: how does a nation treat the legacy of the defeated side? Universities, books, administrative experience, cultural life, and the social memories of the South are all parts of Vietnamese history, whatever one’s political judgment of the Republic of Vietnam may be. A country does not need to restore a vanished regime in order to acknowledge that values worthy of inheritance existed under it.
Looking beyond Vietnam, there is no single formula for reconciliation. After the Second World War, Germany required decades to develop a sufficiently strong culture of memory in which the Nazi past became a continuing subject of education and public debate. South Africa after apartheid chose another path through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: it did not assume that society could reconcile simply by forgetting, but attempted to bring victims’ testimony, perpetrators’ responsibility, conditional amnesty, and questions of reparation into a public process. These models have their own limitations and remain contested. Their relevance here is not that Vietnam should copy them, but that reconciliation is institutional work, not merely a moral appeal.
Comparison with Vietnamese-American reconciliation makes the paradox even more striking. On September 15, 2026, in Da Nang, Vietnam handed over to the United States the “Camp Reasoner” sign and a guard tower from a former U.S. Marine Corps installation during the war. Official Vietnamese sources publicly described the gesture in the language of goodwill, humanitarianism, reconciliation, and healing.
It is an image worthy of respect. But precisely for that reason it raises a question that deserves reflection: if two countries that once fought each other directly can go so far as to respect the relics of a former enemy, how far should reconciliation go among people like the Vietnamese who believe in the shared ancestral myth of coming from the same “womb of one hundred eggs”? The question of the Biên Hòa Military Cemetery, the language used to describe the dead, the right of remembrance, and the place of the Republic of Vietnam’s memory within the common national history therefore belongs not only to the past. They bear directly on the maturity of the present community. The decision to “civilianize” the cemetery was made in 2006–2007, but questions surrounding its preservation, restoration, and meaning for reconciliation have not yet been closed.
Symbols have a power of their own here. A cemetery is no longer a military unit; those lying beneath its graves can no longer participate in any political struggle. How the living treat the dead therefore says more about the living than about the dead. When a community can care for the graves of those who once stood on the opposing side without feeling that its own current identity is threatened, this does not amount to a revision questioning the reality of victory. It may be evidence of greater self-confidence among the victors: the victory has become secure enough that compassion no longer needs to be regarded as dangerous.
Reconciliation does not require everyone to agree about history. That is both impossible and unnecessary. It requires a more basic moral foundation: the dead are no longer enemies; the suffering of a family does not lose its value because their relative once stood on the other side; and the right to belong to the nation cannot forever depend upon the political biography of one’s parents or grandparents.
But reconciliation cannot remain merely a matter of sentiment. If old prejudices continue to reside in language, records, policy, education, and the classification of human beings, appeals to national unity will have difficulty moving beyond the dead hand of ritual. Mature reconciliation must be translated from admirable idealism into daily life: the right to return, the right to remember, the right to contribute, equal access to opportunities, and above all the right to be recognized as a member of the national community without being required to abandon one’s family memory.
This is why overseas Vietnamese communities should not be viewed merely as sources of remittances, expertise, or investment. They also carry a part of Vietnamese history. Within those families are memories of the South, of escape by sea, re-education camps, and loss; but there are also new generations who may no longer speak Vietnamese fluently yet continue to search for the culture of their ancestors. The capacity to allow these memories to rejoin the common national story without first passing a test of political loyalty would be another indicator of successful maturation.
Reconciliation thus becomes a question of the future more than of the past. A Vietnam that seeks to mobilize the resources of millions of Vietnamese overseas, and that wishes to become a civilizational activist in the eyes of the world, cannot stop at geographical reunification. It needs a concept of community broad enough so that Vietnamese people with different memories can still recognize themselves as a legitimate part of a common national story.
17. SELF-CORRECTION – THE MOST DIFFICULT MEASURE OF MATURITY
Every nation can make mistakes. Every state can pursue failed policies. Every civilization has passed through periods in which the values it proclaimed did not correspond to the way it acted. The important difference does not lie in whether a country possesses a spotless past, but in its capacity to recognize, name, and correct its mistakes.
Karl Popper located the advantage of an open society not in its ability to produce perfect rulers, but in its capacity to change decisions and rulers without destroying society itself. Hannah Arendt, from another direction, reminds us of individual responsibility within systems where action can easily dissolve into the machinery of institutions. These reflections meet Vietnamese experience at one point: long-term hope cannot rest upon the assumption that a “wise ruler” will always stand at the top; mechanisms must exist that constrain both good and bad leaders through law and responsibility.
This touches upon a deeper tradition in East Asian political thought. From Mencius’s proposition that “the people are most important” to Nguyễn Trãi’s reflections on the power of the people, earlier thinkers recognized that authority could not be entirely separated from the lives of ordinary people. But there is a great distance between offering moral advice to rulers and constructing mechanisms that make power accountable. Modern political civilization emerged precisely within that distance: from hoping that rulers will be virtuous to constructing institutions that limit power even when rulers are not sufficiently virtuous.
In Vietnam, “rectification of errors” is a phrase carrying considerable historical weight. The Land Reform was followed by a campaign to correct errors. The difficulties of the centrally planned economy were followed by Đổi Mới. In foreign affairs, Vietnam moved from the isolation of the late 1970s and 1980s toward diversification and international integration. These changes demonstrate something important: the current Vietnamese system has not entirely lost the long-standing Vietnamese capacity to adapt.
But adaptation under pressure is different from institutionalized self-correction. If change occurs only after a crisis has become sufficiently severe, the social price may be very high. Maturity requires embedding reflective capacity within normal life: policies can be tested and evaluated; unfavorable data are not concealed; experts can disagree; journalists can ask questions; citizens can lodge complaints; and mistakes of the past can be studied without turning those who study them into objects of suspicion.
We can imagine three levels of self-correction. The lowest is correcting a decision after its consequences have become undeniable. A higher level is correcting the mechanism that produced that decision. The highest is building a system capable of detecting error before it becomes disaster. This third level requires relatively independent institutions, reliable data, professional journalism, scientific freedom, and a political culture that does not interpret the admission of error as a loss of face.
This is the difference between pretense and responsibility. In a political culture heavily concerned with preserving “face”, correcting an error can easily be understood as admitting defeat. There is therefore a tendency to defend an old decision with a new decision, and then defend the new decision through still more measures. In a culture of responsibility, by contrast, the ability to say “we were wrong” can itself be evidence of strength. A mature scientist does not lose credibility by revising a hypothesis in the face of new evidence; neither should a mature institution.
Seen in this sense, science and democracy share one civilizational quality: both assume that no one possesses final truth.
Science advances because hypotheses can be falsified. Politics advances when policies can be questioned and power can be scrutinized. Wherever every criticism is interpreted as hostility, the system’s capacity to learn will gradually contract.
This lesson is not addressed only to the state. A mature society must also know how to correct itself. Regional prejudice, credentialism, a culture of personal connections, habits of avoiding responsibility, tolerance of false information, or the tendency to turn every disagreement into a moral battle between individuals cannot all be attributed to a governing apparatus. If policy changes but the social habits that generate these problems do not, reform will repeatedly encounter old problems under new names.
Family and education therefore return in vital importance for Maturation as two fundamental institutions. A child taught to obey adults absolutely will not suddenly become a citizen capable of debate upon reaching the age of eighteen. A student accustomed to memorizing the “correct answer” will have difficulty becoming a researcher willing to question the textbook. An official formed in an environment where safety matters more than initiative will not automatically become a reformer simply because a resolution calls for innovation. Institutions and human beings produce one another.
We can therefore understand why “Maturity” is not a vague psychological quality but a civilizational process. It occurs simultaneously within individuals, families, schools, society, and the state. Individuals learn responsibility; families learn to respect difference; schools learn to encourage questions; society learns to live with disagreement; the state learns self-restraint. If one of these levels is missing, the others will find it difficult to endure.
Maturity also requires the capacity to inherit what was once rejected. A value does not become wrong merely because it once existed on the other side of a battle line. Reflections by Northern intellectuals once criticized, educational and cultural experiences from the South, achievements of overseas Vietnamese communities, and lessons of governance learned from the wider world can all become common assets once they cross the barriers of political identity.
This is not eclecticism, still less an attempt to dissolve right and wrong into an undefined memory. Inheritance requires selection. What matters is that the criterion of selection should be the value of an idea for human beings and for the future of the country, not the political identity of the place from which it came. When an idea is right merely because it is “ours,” or wrong merely because it is “theirs,” thought has not yet escaped the battlefield.
This is precisely the transition from a historical community to a invigorated civilizational activist. A historical community is bound together by what has happened: origins, wars, memories, victories, and losses. A civilizational activist, by contrast, is also held together by the capacity to decide collectively what will happen. One receives its identity from the past; the other acquires, in addition, the capacity to create the future.
This also changes the meaning of patriotism. Patriotism is no longer only the defense of territory or loyalty to a single narrative of history. It also means protecting the dignity of the Vietnamese people, their creative capacities, and the right of generations not yet born to inherit a better country. In such a conception, a dissenter is not automatically outside the nation; a Vietnamese living abroad is not less Vietnamese because of geographical distance; and a memory different from the official memory does not therefore have to be erased from the community.
At the deepest level, a civilizational community must be capable of living with its own incompleteness. No nation ever “finishes” maturing. Every generation encounters questions that earlier generations could not have known: artificial intelligence, climate change, population aging, shifts in supply chains, new forms of digital power, and competition among great powers. The past can provide fortitude, but it cannot provide ready-made answers to use in the future.
Maturity therefore does not mean finding an immutable formula for Vietnam. It means building the capacity continuously to learn, choose, and adjust. A mature society does not need to know every crossroads in advance; it needs people and institutions sufficiently clear-minded that, when a crossroads appears, they can recognize the alternatives, debate them, and accept responsibility for the path they choose.
A mature nation, therefore, is not a nation without division. It is a nation that knows how to live with differences without turning difference into a battle line; not a nation that never makes mistakes, but one that creates mechanisms through which mistakes can be detected and corrected; not a nation that forgets the past, but one sufficiently confident to look at its past in its entirety.
CONCLUSION
Resilient Continuity answers the question: why are we still here? Maturity asks the more difficult question: what will we become given everything we have experienced?
From voices once excluded from the mainstream; from the different educational experiences of the two regions; from memories that have not yet fully encountered one another since 1975 to the capacity for reconciliation with a former enemy such as the United States, a common thread emerges: Vietnam does not lack vitality. What remains to be built is the capacity to transform that vitality into self-reflection, self-restraint, and self-correction.
Maturity therefore does not negate past greatness in enduring the whims of fate. It is a higher stage in the application of resilience to reality. A community that once learned how not to disappear must now learn how not to allow the past to lock away the possibilities of the future. From resisting assimilation to accommodating difference, from mobilization to development, from victory to reconciliation, from reactive correction of mistakes to institutionalized self-correction—these are the transformations through which historical vitality can become civilizational capacity.
A community truly becomes a civilizational activist when the past is no longer a prison for the future. Maturity, therefore, is not the final destination. It is the condition for moving toward another question: after knowing who we are, and after daring to look at both our achievements and our failures, what possibilities can Vietnam open up in a world undergoing transformation? This is also the subject of PART V: OPENING UP: VIETNAM IN A TRANSFORMING WORLD ORDER.
————————————–
TÀI LIỆU THAM KHẢO – PHẦN III
- Trần Đình Hượu, Đến hiện đại từ truyền thống, NXB Văn hóa, Hà Nội, 1996.
- Nguyễn Mạnh Tường, Qua những sai lầm trong Cải cách ruộng đất – Xây dựng quan điểm lãnh đạo, tham luận tại Mặt trận Tổ quốc Việt Nam, Hà Nội, 30/10/1956.
- Trần Đức Thảo, “Nội dung xã hội và hình thức tự do”, 1956.
- Fernand Braudel, Écrits sur l’histoire [Luận về lịch sử], Flammarion, Paris, 1969.
- Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire collective [Ký ức tập thể], Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1950.
- Paul Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli [Ký ức, lịch sử, sự lãng quên], Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2000.
- Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States [Ra đi, Lên tiếng và Trung thành], Harvard University Press, 1970.
- Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance [Thể chế, thay đổi thể chế và thành quả kinh tế], Cambridge University Press, 1990.
- Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom [Phát triển như là tự do], Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999.
- Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage [Vấn đề tội lỗi của nước Đức], 1946. Dùng chủ yếu cho sự phân biệt giữa trách nhiệm hình sự, chính trị, đạo đức và trách nhiệm của con người trước những thảm họa lịch sử.
- Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence [Giữa trả thù và tha thứ: Đối diện lịch sử sau diệt chủng và bạo lực đại chúng], Beacon Press, Boston, 1998.
- Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik [Cái bóng dài của quá khứ: Văn hóa ký ức và chính trị lịch sử], C.H. Beck, Munich, 2006.
- Albert Camus, L’Homme révolté [Con người nổi loạn], Gallimard, Paris, 1951.
- Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless [Quyền lực của những người không quyền lực], 1978.
- Nguyễn Văn Trung, các khảo luận về văn hóa, giáo dục, trí thức và xã hội miền Nam Việt Nam trước 1975. Dùng như một tiếng nói trí thức miền Nam trong đối thoại về dân tộc, hiện đại hóa và căn tính văn hóa.
- Vương Trí Nhàn, các khảo luận về tâm lý, tập quán và những giới hạn văn hóa của người Việt. Sử dụng theo hướng khảo sát khả năng tự phản tỉnh và tự sửa mình của xã hội, không xem các đặc điểm được mô tả như những “bản tính dân tộc” bất biến.
- Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, précédé du Portrait du colonisateur [Chân dung người bị trị – Chân dung người thực dân], Éditions Buchet/Chastel, Paris, 1957.