The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 142. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Existentialism)

Episode Date: October 25, 2020

--From: 2014 Personality Lecture 13: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Existentialism)--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, perhaps the greatest Russian author of the twentieth century, was an Orthodox Christian existentialist, a direct descendant of Dostoevsky's thinking, and a man who took a mighty axe to the terrible tangled roots of communist totalitarianism. He associated inauthentic being on the part of the individual, within society, with the direct degeneration of that society into tyranny and malevolence.--For Advertising Inquiries, visit https://www.advertisecast.com/TheJordanBPetersonPodcast

I'm going to read you something that he wrote. I'm going to try to tell you today why the events in the 20th century happened. So the map is a map that is not a map. I'm going to try to tell you what happened in the 20th century. I'm going to try to tell you today why the events in the 20th century. I'm going to read you something that he wrote. I'm going to try to tell you today why the events in the 20th century happened. So the mass genocidal movements in particular, which were probably the defining characteristic

of the 20th century. And then also what that has to do with individual psychology. My first degree was in political science and I was interested in political science because I was interested fundamentally in the reason that human societies went to war. And when I was studying political science, which is quite a long time ago,

the fundamental theory that underlie political scientists' explanations for conflict or economic, people fight over resources. And that never seemed reasonable to me because, first of all, obviously, many wars are fought for other reasons than resources. Two Central American countries, I think it was Guatemala and the Honduras, if I remember correctly, went to war over a soccer game. So the outcome of a disputed outcome of a soccer game. And even if you do think that the reason that people, groups of people engage in conflict

are for economic reasons, that doesn't exactly explain much because that doesn't explain whether they're fighting for, because of absolute differences in wealth or because of relative discrepancies in wealth, and those are very, very different causal elements. And then even if people do fight for economic reasons, which means they're fighting for things that they value, it isn't exactly clear why people value what they value

because different societies value different things. So economics in the final analysis ends up being a shallow explanation. And I pursued economic and political and sociological explanations for social conflict for a long time, but eventually they became untenable to me and that's partly why I went and studied clinical psychology because it struck me that the right level of analysis for understanding mass movements like the Nazi movement or the ideological possession that characterized the Stalinist Soviets or Mao's communists

or Paul Potts' Cambodian communists or any of the dictators that you can talk about who are on the far left or the far right during the 20th century. To me, those were failings of individual personality and the most astute writers that I've ever read who described what they assumed to be the causes of these terrible conflicts made the same point, which is why I'm having you read Victor Frankl and Alexander Solzhenitsyn,

because Solzhenitsyn is not generally regard as a personality psychologist. But of all the people I've ever read, he's the one who lays out the connection between the existential failure of the individual and the mass catastrophes of society. And to me, that's too important to link to overlook. And it also strikes me that it's the primary lesson

of the 20th century. One lesson, for example, is beware of ideologies. And the reason I'm going to walk you through Nietzsche and a bit of Kirchgaard today is because these people in the late 19th century, with their antennas up, knew that the collapse, one way of looking at it is the collapse of traditional Western values. That's one way of looking at what set up

the preconditions for the people's humanities, susceptibility to ideologies in the 20th centuries, in the 20th century. The other way of looking at it in some senses that as the world came together in the 19th century and ideas were passed around from culture to culture more rapidly than they had ever been passed around, every culture suffered deculturation in some sense

because if I believe something and you believe something and there's a long history behind both of our beliefs, when we come into contact, we'll either fight and I'll try to destroy you, or if I don't, if I take you seriously and you take me seriously, then that's gonna leave us both wondering exactly what's rock solid underneath this.

That's what need to come in on in this particular quote. Of what is great one either must be silent or speak with greatness, with greatness, that means cynically and with innocence. What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently, the advent of nihilism. Nihilism is the belief in nothing, or the belief that things have no meaning. Our whole European culture is moving for some time now with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade as towards a catastrophe, restlessly, violently, and headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end,

that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect. He that speaks here has conversely done nothing so far, but to reflect as a philosopher and solitary by instinct who has found his advantage in standing aside, outside. Why has the event, advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence.

Because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals. Because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value those values really had, we require at some time new values. nihilism stands at the door. Whence comes this uncannyist of all guests. Point of departure.

It's an error to consider social distress or physiological degeneration or corruption of all things as the cause of nihilism. ours is the most honest and compassionate age. So Nietzsche dispeznses right away with sociological explanations for people's lack of belief in meaning in life. You know, and what a lot of what you're taught in universities is sociological in its causal thinking. And the causal path is often, it's the social conditions that people find themselves in that determine their response to the world, but Nietzsche stands violently against that perspective, and this is 150 years ago, even before,

in some sense, it was thoroughly well developed. And the reason he stands against it is because he points out that wherever you're positioned in society, your position can be made subject to any number of individual interpretations. It's meaning, like the meaning of being poor, say, or the meaning of being comparatively poor, isn't a meaning that's etched in stone. And so it has to be interpreted psychologically before it can become a causal factor. And if it can be interpreted psychologically, then it's not a fact like the existence of a mountain is a fact. It's still an interpretation. He says, distress itself, whether psychic, psychological, physical, or intellectual,

also need not produce nihilism. So he also rejects suffering itself as a cause of nihilism. Need not at all produce nihilism. That is the radical rejection of value, meaning and desirability. Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Rather, it is in one particular interpretation,

the Christian moral one that nihilism is rooted. The end of Christianity, at the hands of its own morality, which cannot be replaced, which turns against the Christian God, the sense of truthfulness highly developed by Christianity, is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history. It's a rebound from God is the truth to the fanatical faith, all is false, an active Buddhism.

So it's a strange interpretation because Nietzsche, although he was violently anti-Christian in his self-presentation to the public was more like a, in my opinion, was more like a beneficial critic of the Western Christian tradition. And because the first thing he realized was that the domination of the West, essentially by the Catholic Church for something like 1900 years was necessary in order for the European mind to become trained and focused. So his point was that you, unless you learn to place an interpretive scheme on the world and interpret that world in a coherent manner through that scheme, you don't have a trained mind. And for Nici, in some sense, it didn't really matter what the interpretive scheme was. It was just that at some point, you

had to discipline yourself, and this would be something like a post-adolescent process. You had to discipline yourself by developing an adherence to some sort of coherent, deep coherent view. And the consequence of that, at least in principle, could be that you could come to be the sort of person that would be respectful of the truth, and also someone who regarded truth as a moral virtue, as a higher order moral virtue. But then Nietzsche's point was that Christianity

developed that sense in Europe to such a degree that the spirit of truth seeking went after the axioms of Christianity and demolished them. That was his view of what happened during the Enlightenment as a consequence of the interaction between science and religion. So Nietzsche's view was that the modern mind will say, because we're speaking 150 years later, the modern mind had been trained rigorously to interpret things through a coherent structure. And then once that training had occurred, then it could use any number of coherent structures,

and then it could also use its ability to form a relationship with the truth, to criticize the very thing that gave rise to that mind. And that snitches diagnosis of the 20th century individual. The pursuit of truth itself had undermined the structure that gave birth to the pursuit of truth. And that left people wide open, and left them wide open on the one hand to nihilism,

and nihilism is the belief that nothing has meaning. Nothing has any final meaning. And the best way of expressing nihilism, and nihilism is the belief that nothing has meaning. Nothing has any final meaning. And the best way of expressing nihilism is what the hell difference is it going to make in a thousand years what we do today, or in a hundred years for that matter. And it's a rational reduction of all of the experiences of life to rational insignificance.

Nothing has any final meaning. And so the question, of course, that emerges from that is, well, why do anything on a deeper question that emerges from that is, well, why bear suffering? And, but that's not the only problem from an existential point of view,

because the existentialists and Nietzsche as well also believe that nihilism was actually unbearable. Because people suffer, they have to have a framework of meaning in which to place the suffering because otherwise it undermines their ability to live and people can't move forward in that condition. And so another one of Nietzsche's prognostications was that nihilism would produce its counterpart, which was totalitarianism, and people would leap from their immersion,

saying in evolutionarily emergent systems of faith and jump headlong into rational utopian constructions of reality, because people can't do without an interpretive framework. So it wasn't as if the consequence of moving beyond religion was going to be a step into enlightenment, which is what materialist rationalists always presume. They presume if you could just shed the superstitious clap trap that's associated with your religious heritage, you'd instantly be enlightened. But Nietzsche's point was that is not what's likely to happen,

what's likely to happen is two things. People will either give up on life completely and become cynical, prematurely cynical, which is certainly a disease of young people, and maybe it's always been a disease of young people, but it's certainly been a disease of young people since, say, the end of World War II. So they become nihilistic and not believe

that anything has any meaning and that undermines their ability to strive or they fall prey to some sort of rigid ideology. And Nietzsche also understood that if people fell prey to a rigid ideology or several rigid ideologies, that the only plausible outcome of that would be like exceptionally intense warfare. And of course, that's exactly what happened

in the 20th century. Now, Nietzsche also says, this can't be reversed. Skepticism regarding morality is what is decisive. The end of the moral interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it is tried to escape into some beyond leads to nihilism, all lax meaning. And then he says, the untenability of one interpretation

of the world upon which a tremendous amount of energy has been lavished, awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false. So it's a brilliant observation, because his point is, I've seen this in fundamentalist, Christians, for example, who I've taught in the past, because I have a very biological view of things. And these people, I met more of them

when I was in the United States. They were more intelligent than they were wise, meaning the constraints within which their intellect was forced to operate, which would be the Christian fundamentalist constraints, were not sophisticated enough to encapsulate their intellect. They were too smart for their own theories. So they come to university and be exposed to ideas that were outside the scope, say of Christian fundamentalism, would just blow their fundamentalist presuppositions into bits. And so then, of course, they fall into nothing. But Nietzsche says it's even worse than that. It's not only that you fall into nothing.

It's that once one of your systems of belief has been destroyed, you also learn that systems of beliefs themselves are unreliable. And so you can't just move easily from one to another because it's like, well, you're in a boat and it's sunk, and now you know that if you jump to the next boat, that boat could also sink. So it's not only that your boat has sunk. It's now you know that all boats can sink. And so that's part of the position of the modern person,

as far as Nietzsche was concerned, is that every one of us knows, at least in principle, that all the boats that we want to jump into could potentially sink. And so Nietzsche saw nihilism as the inevitable consequence, the inevitable rational consequence of that realization. Now, I told you guys before, Nisha was a very, very influential person. He influenced Heidegger and Heidegger,

influenced Bin Swanger and Boss, but Nisha also influenced young as much as Freud did and Jungspet his whole career, trying to solve the question that Nisha posed. One of the questions was, because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these values really have. So the collapse of a belief system makes all the values within it no longer tenable. That's the meaning of Nietzsche's statement that God is dead. He said, if you take the central axiom out of a system of belief, you can't hold on to all the things

that were derived from that axiom. So here, an example is this. So, for example, in modern Western law, there's a presupposition. And the presupposition is that, in some weird sense, everyone is equal before the law. And that's predicated on the idea that not even applies to someone who's a murderer, or you're a murderer, and it's known. You have to be treated with respect. You know, you have to be treated with respect by the legal system, and that's a very, very strange...

It's a miracle that something like that ever emerged because it's so unlikely. So then you might ask, well, what is the idea that everyone has worth before the law? Grounded in, where does that idea come from? It comes from the idea of natural rights that we have natural rights. And then you might ask, well, where do the idea

of natural rights come from? Well, then you're starting to move beyond the realm of rational philosophy because natural rights, the idea of natural rights has been something that has been an idea that's been emerging for thousands and thousands of years. It's grounded in Christianity, at least in the map. It's grounded in Christianity to the degree that one of the things that distinguishes Christianity is the idea that there is a universal faith and that everyone, whether they're in that faith or not, has intrinsic value. And so natural rights are grounded in the idea of the intrinsic value of the soul. And then that's grounded in the

idea that consciousness itself participates in creation and say that's an idea that's embedded in Genesis and also in most creation stories. So when you get rid of the religious underpinnings, which ground the entire system in a kind of dream-like mythology. When you get rid of that, there's no reason that what's left over rationally can survive. And you can see that if you look at what happened in the 20th century, because there were at least two major challenges to the civilizations that evolved, and they weren't only Christian or Jewish civilizations, the same thing happened in China. replacement of these evolved moral systems that emerged over a tremendous amount of time that no one rationally created. Once people started to criticize them and to destroy the axioms on which they were built

and move them aside, then there was a gaping hole left. And the hole was filled, well, it was filled most particularly either by Nazism, which you know spread like mad throughout central Europe, or by communism, which still possesses China. So even though China came from a historical culture that was substantially different from say that of Western Europe, once rationality emerged to the point

where it could be used as a critical force, which happened in Europe, that spread like mad. And it undermined the societies of China, just like it undermined the societies of the West. I mean, Russia, you can read this if you read Tolstoy, for example. In Tolstoy's confessions, Russia was really the last country that underwent the transformations that were associated with the enlightenment. So, when Tolstoy was a young person in the late 19th century, he said he could literally remember when the announcement spread through his school that God was dead. Now, the Western Europeans had been working on that idea for a couple of hundred years, you know, with the dawn of scientific thinking.

But the Russians were very backwards in some sense, and they never... They never... They were never affected by the conflict between rationality and religion until it happened all at once. And it happened all at once at the end of the 19th century. And the consequence of that, it's complicated.

But the consequence of that was that the monarchy exploded. And then the consequence of that was that the Russians were left with nothing. And the consequence of that was the Bolshevik revolution. And then that was what started the entire Soviet nightmare. You see very frequently that when a society loses its grounding, say in its historical truths, that it turns to something as an alternative, you see the same thing happened in Quebec.

Because Quebec didn't undergo the modern transformation until the late 1950s. It was probably the last European society to go through the Enlight enlightenment revolution, because the Catholic Church was an incredibly dominant force in Catholic Quebec until the late 1950s. In the average family size during that time must have been in the neighborhood of 10 children. And then all of a sudden, in the late 1950s, the Quebecers just lost their Catholicism. It was just gone. And now, for example, the Cabequois have the lowest marriage rate in the Western world, and one of the lowest reproduction rates as well.

And there was a Gallup poll that was conducted. I heard about this about, must be 10 years ago now. I don't know if this information has ever been made public, but there was a Gallup poll that indicated that if you were a Catholic who had lost your faith, so you left the church, you were ten times more likely to be a separatist. So you can see, the consequence of it is, is that if one belief system disappears, well, nihilism is one possibility, but another possibility is that you just adopt the next

thing that's close that gives you structure. And nationalism, of course, is one of those things. So Nietzsche diagnosed the disease fundamentally. And then the psychoanalysts, like Jung in particular, they were trying to see, Nietzsche believed that if God died, because God died, people were going to have to take on the responsibility that was once God's, so to speak, as a personal problem. So, that speaks their ethos, and Nietzsche said,

God is dead, and we have killed him, and we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood. But he also said, in order for people to withstand that catastrophe, they would have to become gods themselves, essentially. And while you can see how that might go wrong, if you think about people like Stalin and Hitler. But the psychoanalysts also, like the psychoanalysts, especially Jung, and then Heidegger for his part, took that idea seriously,

and Jung said was trying to figure out, well, if we lose our historically conditioned values, we no longer believe in them. And if nihilism is the outcome on one hand and totalitarianism is the outcome on the other hand, what's left and the Jungian idea was, well, the revelation of the self is that the individual could not as a rational mind, but the individual as a totality, it's something that Rogers also believed, the individual as a totality would be capable of bringing forth genuine values as a consequence of self-exploration and honesty, something like that. And that's associated with the existential idea of individual responsibility.

So one of the upshorts of the Union theory is that to the degree you don't bear the responsibility for your own actions, to the degree that you avoid responsibility or shun't them off onto say, totalitarian or ideological systems. So, when you avoid responsibility for your own thought, because if you're the follower of an ideological system, you have avoided the responsibility of thinking for yourself. And the consequence of that was continual catastrophe as those pathological rational systems unfolded themselves. Solzhenetsin wrote the Goulogar Capelago and published it in the early 1970s. And there were two things that made that book very striking. One was, the stories that he told were so unbelievably powerful

that you couldn't read them and not believe it was true. And that was even the case if you were a devoted Marxist. And at that time, in the universities, and in many ways it hasn't changed that much, the universities in the West were dominated by Marxists. And to some degree, that was ethically inexcusable because people had known since the 1950s, especially since George Orwell wrote,

people had known since the 1950s, especially since George Orwell wrote, people had known since the 1950s that the Stellan the State was murderous beyond belief. So Stellan, for example, killed six million Ukrainians in the 1930s. He starved them to death, because all of the farmers had been collectivized at that point. And what that meant was all the good farmers had been killed

and all the resentful farmers had been given the land, and then they collectivized the farms, and then Stalin took all the food to feed the cities, or to starve the Ukrainians, depending on how you look at it. And the edicts were so harsh that if you were Ukrainian and you had a family, and they were starving, and you went into a field after it had been harvested, and you picked out individual grains from the dirt to gather in a bowl to feed your family if you got caught, then they would shoot you. Solzhenitsyn observed this, and he was very interested

in how this system developed. And his conclusion after decades of thinking was that the reason the Russian system was able to maintain itself fundamentally, was because individuals were willing to give up the responsibility of their own relationship to the truth, to the state, and constantly lie to themselves about everything. And that if the individuals that composed the state had refused to accept things that they knew full well to be untrue, that the state wouldn't have been able to survive.

And, you know, Solzhenitsky's case is very strong because in some sense, he was the first person who told the truth about the Goulai Garcopelago, which was this chain of prison camps that the Soviets had erected on which their economy was essentially based. He was the first person who really told the truth about that, and he hit the foundations of Marx's theory so hard that, well, partly it collapsed and partly it went underground into movements like postmodernism.

So his proposition, it's a Dostoevsky proposition, actually, that one person who stopped lying could overturn a tyranny. It's a hard thing to believe, but there's been multiple examples of that sort of thing in the 20th century. It happened with Gandhi, it happened with Vakla of Havel and Czechoslovakia, it happened with Nelson Mandela, it happened with Solje Nitsin. So, those are pretty powerful examples

of the power of a single individual who refuses to accept the conventional lie. Dostoevsky was writing about the same time as Nietzsche. And Dostoevsky is a very interesting person. He was in orthodox Christian, although he's a very intelligent man. And Dostyewski and Nietzsche are twins in some sense. So what Nietzsche wrote in philosophy, Dostyewski wrote in literature.

And one of Dostyewski's primary statements was that if there's no God, everything is permitted. So it's a take on Nietzsche's discussion of nihilism. It's like, well, if there's no God, everything is permitted. So it's a take on Nietzsche's discussion of nihilism. It's like, well, if there's no ultimate value of any sort, then why can't you do exactly what you want? And that's a theme he explores to great purpose in crime and punishment. Nietzsche's conclusion was that the reason you can't do anything

you want is because you actually come equipped with an inherent set of values that are real, and that if you violate them to too great a degree, you'll destroy your own structure, as well as damaging the society that's around you. So Dostoevsky was a big believer in some sense, like the unions and the Rogerians, that there are the locus of values within a human being, and then it's an actual thing.

You can't disregard it without damage. Dostoyevsky was also a very powerful critic of reason. And the reason for that was, it was reason in some sense that brought down the House of Cards, so to speak, that constituted classical face. But the consequence of that rational destruction of values was the emergence of nihilism or totalitarianism.

And the consequence of those two things is either the inability to live or the emergence of the murderous state. So Dostoyevsky looked at that and thought, okay, well, perhaps our belief that reason itself is the proper guide to reality is wrong. And so this is one of the things he wrote in notes from underground. When he was exploring this idea, notes from underground, by the way, it's very short book and it's very much worth reading.

It's Dostoevsky wrote five books that are incalculably great. And what happened to Dostoevsky? I books that are incalculably great. And what happened to Dostoevsky? I don't remember if I told you this or not, but he was a student radical and he was arrested by the Tsar's men because of a riot or a protest

that him and his compatriots had come up with. He was sort of a bit player in it, but they put him in prison when he was a young man. And then he was in prison for quite a while, and then one day they took him out into the courtyard and they shot him at dawn. You know, they had the soldiers lying up and put him by a post and shot him, but they used blanks. But he didn't know that.

And it scared him so bad he had epileptic seizure. And then he had epileptic seizures for the rest of his life. And the kind of epileptic seizures he had were associated with mystical experience. So Dostoevsky, before he got a seizure, would have this sense that he was experiencing the world in a more and more meaningful way until he was on the very dawn of sort of omniscient knowledge and then he'd have a seizure. But it wasn't until he was shot with blanks and then put in this terrible prison for a long period of time and had epilepsy

that he became a great novelist. It changed him in some way. His early writings are really, they're not good. They're sterile and dry. And his later writings, the five great novels in particular are, they're in a class of their own. So Dostoevsky, the first thing Dostoevsky tried to come to grips with was the fact he didn't believe that life itself was rational.

That's an enlightenment proposition that the structure of reality is in and of itself rational. So it can be helped. It can be dealt with by rational means. And that's been a very powerful theory because it's enabled us to develop this scientific viewpoint and the technology that goes along with it. But rationality is not the only mode of human knowing. There's all sorts of other modes of human knowing. And those are associated with emotion and motivation. They're more biologically instantiated, say say unless computational. And rationality has a very difficult time, even conceptualizing how those other modes of knowing might be real.

And so what it tends to do is denigrate them as mere opponents to rationality. But the Dostoevsky perspective, and this is also something that Rogers followed up on. And Jung was that life itself is so irrational, or experience itself is so irrational, given its suffering and its absurdity, that a merely rationally formulated representation of life

is insufficient. It can't manage the job. And what rationality will therefore do is cut away everything from life, cut away everything from its definition of reality that it can't actually encapsulate. Dostoyevsky said, in short, one may say anything about the history of the world,

anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational. The very word sticks in one's throat. And indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening. They are continually turning up in life, moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity,

who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be so to speak, a light to their neighbors neighbors simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that these very people sooner or later have been false to themselves. So that's a precursor of Freudian ideas. Playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one. Now I ask you, what can be expected of man

since he is a being endowed with such strange qualities? Show her upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface, give him economic prosperity, so that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species. And even then, out of sheer gratitude and spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes, and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal

fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself as if that was so necessary that men are still men, and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threatened to control so completely, that soon one will be able to desire nothing, except by the calendar. And that's not all. Even if men really were nothing but a piano key,

even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then, he would not become reasonable. He would do purposefully do something perverse, out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, and suffering of all sorts only to gain his point. He will launch a curse upon the world. And as only man can curse, it's his privilege,

the primary distinction between him and other animals. Maybe by his curse alone, he will attain his object. That is to convince himself that he's a man, not a piano key. And if you say that all of this, too, can be calculated, and tabulated, and chaos, and darkness, and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposefully go mad in order to be rid of reason

and gain his point. I believe in it, I answer for it. For the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he's a man, not a piano key. It might be at the cost of his skin, it might be by cannibalism. And this being so can one help being tempted to rejoice

that it has not yet come off and that desire still depends on something we don't know? You will scream at me, that is if you can't descend to do so, that no one is touching my free will, that all they're concerned with is that my free will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests and the laws of nature and arithmetic.

Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two makes four, twice two makes four without my will, as if free will meant that. That was written in the late 1800s as well. And Dostoevsky had already figured out by that point that the consequence of the new ideas swimming into Russia

and undermining Orthodox Christianity, which was say the natural culture in some sense of Russia, was going to be either nihilism or totalitarianism. And he examined the propositions of totalitarianism and the propositions of totalitarianism were essentially utopian. The idea was, except, it's like a cult,

except this mode of being, except this interpretation of the world, and society will advance towards a point where, well, say in the case of communism, wealth is equally distributed, and everyone is free. And it's a very, very powerful idea, obviously, because it attracted hundreds of millions of people, each according to each according to his need from each, according to his ability.

Sounds fair. You get what you have, you get what you need to live and you contribute. What's in it? What's in you to contribute? And when it was laid out in the world, it was an absolute catastrophe. And Dostoevsky criticized this before it even happened. He said, look, human beings do not want utopia. We're too insane for that. If you had comfort, sterile comfort, if you had everything you wanted, just given to you, all you do is go crazy just so that you wouldn't have to be bored by all that perfection. You destroy it so that the irrational element that's inside of you, so this Dionysian element, could leap out and live.

And so whatever utopia is, it's not the permanent solution to all of your problems. You don't even want to live without problems. Kirchegard writing at a little earlier, but along the similar track of ideas. He's also criticizing the idea of utopia, believing at least in part that the meaning in life is to be found within the struggle that constitutes life

and not in the solution to that struggle, which maybe is equivalent to death and not to utopia. It is about four years ago that I got the notion of wanting to try my luck as an author. I remember it quite clearly. It was a Sunday. Yes, a Sunday afternoon. I was seated as usual outside at the cafe in the Fredericksburg Garden.

I'd been a student for half a score of years, although never lazy, all my activity, nevertheless, was like a glittering inactivity, a kind of occupation for which I still have a great partiality, and for which perhaps I even have a little genius. I read much, spent the remainder of the day idling and thinking, or thinking and idling, but that was all it came to. So I sat there and I smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought.

Among other thoughts, I remember these. You were going on, I said to myself, to become an old man, without being anything, and without really undertaking to do anything. On other hand, wherever you look around you, in literature and in life, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious and much heralded men who are coming into prominence, and are much talked about. The many benefactors of the age

who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier. Some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by the telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing. And finally, the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier, yet more and more significant. And what are you doing?

Here, my soloiquois was interrupted because my cigarette was smoked out and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again and then suddenly this thought flashed into my mind. You must do something, but in as much as with your limited capacities, it will be impossible for you to make anything easier than it has already become. You must with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others undertake to make something harder. This notion pleased me immensely. And at the same time, it flattered me to think

that I, like the rest of them, would be loved and esteemed by the whole community. For when all combined in every way to make everything easier, there remains only one possible danger, namely, that the ease will become so great that it becomes altogether too great. Then there's only one want left, although it is not yet a felt want when people will want difficulty. Out of love for mankind and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy.

I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere. Kierkegaard is often regarded as an existentialist. One of the ideas that runs its way through it, existentialism is the idea that to be human is to simultaneously be saddled with an intrinsic responsibility, a moral responsibility that you're responsible not only to yourself, to your soul, say, but also to the people around you, and that that isn't an arbitrary imposition that's imposed upon you by rationality or by your fellow man for that matter, but something that's right at the heart of the reality of existence itself,

such that if you thwart or fall short of bearing that responsibility, you'll pay a price in guilt and in shame and in suffering. Vince Wanger and brought boss working off Heidegger's lead said that guilt and fear are debts to possibility. If you're guilty about something, well, it's because you're not upholding your responsibility. said that guilt and fear are debts to possibility. If you're guilty about something, well, it's because you're not upholding your responsibility. Whereas for Freud, that was often a form of pathology.

Excess guilt. And of course, excess guilt can become pathological. But Kierkegaard's point is that guilt itself isn't something to be cured. It's an integral and necessary part of reality, just like disgust and despair and fear at all the negative emotions. They alert you to your place in the world and guide you towards the unfolding of your spirit. Failure to shoulder your existential burden is what results in neurotic guilt and fear. Ben Swanger and boss also believe that like existential anxiety and that's the feeling of

nothingness is fear of loss of a world, the world that you inhabit, the conceptual world that you inhabit, inhabit can be destroyed at any moment and that you're aware of that at some level. It's the same comment that Nietzsche made. And Nietzsche believed that this was something that modern people were particularly susceptible to, because our rationality is always capable of sawing off the branch that we're sitting on.

Because no matter what you're doing, even if you're engaged in it deeply, the critical part of your mind can always say, well, what makes you think that's so worthwhile? And an answer could be, well, it manifests itself as being worthwhile. And why should I pay attention to those rational doubts? But that's not how we're trained. We're trained that rationality is the thing that encompasses everything, instead of being trained that rationality is something that's encompassed by something else. And so with doubts come up that

are rational, we immediately believe them because they're rational. Instead of asking ourselves, well, if the rational doubt is undermining the meaning in my life and making it difficult for me to proceed, maybe the thing to do is to question whether or not that doubt is valid. Now, it depends on what you regard as real, because if it's real, if it's the rational argument itself that's real, then you can't dispense with the doubts. But if you say, well, rationality is too limited in its apprehension to deal with the absurdity of life, there are other sorts of answers, like music, for example, or art, or the kind

of engagement that you experience when you're involved in something that you're incredibly interested in. Those are forms of reality that you can regard those as forms of reality that transcend rationalism, instead of being something embedded inside rationalism that can be destroyed by doubt. And the problem with doubt is that it can undermine you completely, not snileism, but even worse than that, it can lay you open to ideological possession. And that's satanic in its catastrophe. We're all talk to you a little bit now about the concentration camp. Concentration camps were established.

They were established in England, Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia, and Yugoslavia. And in the Soviet Union, the estimates, these are estimates that were derived by Solje Netsin, where that 66 million people died in internal repression in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959. That's a figure that's 10 times as great as the figures that are commonly used

to describe the genocide raid in the Holocaust, which was more like 6 million. And so it's also estimated, but no one knows that 100 million people died in China during Mao's cultural revolution when Mao decided that he was going to wipe out all of Chinese tradition and destroyed much of the ancient artifacts that characterized that tradition, in a like a riotous catastrophe that lasted more than a decade. Solzhenitsen says, the imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evil doers stopped short at a dozen corpses because they had no ideology, ideology. That's what gives makes me feel like I'm a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a

man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a

man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a This was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills by invoking Christianity. The conqueror foreign lands by extolling the grandeur of their motherland, the colonizers by civilization, the Nazis by race, and the Jacobins early and late by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. Without evil doers, there would have been no archipelago. The archipelago, the Goulag archipelago is Sojanitsyn's metaphor for the prison camps, like the prison camps that exist now in North Korea, in which millions of people are starving and dying

for the prison camps that littered the entire Soviet Union. And those cultures became so pathological that in East Germany, for example, before the wall fell down, and East Germany was arguably one of the more civilized parts of the Soviet state. One person out of three was a government informer. So if you have a family of five people, there's a reasonable probability that two of them are going to tell a government agent what you say and think. And that that was also portrayed as the highest possible moral virtue,

because it was much better for you to be a admirable citizen of the state than say a loyal daughter. And that's what children were taught in school, that the family was a defunct unit and that individual relationships were secondary. And that all that mattered was adherence to the dogma that constituted the central axioms

of the state. mattered was adherence to the dogma that constituted the central axioms of the state. This is Solzhenitsyn's description of how communist ideological uniformity was enforced in the prison camps. An anonymous author has told how executions were carried out at ADAC, a camp on the Petroir River. They would take the opposition members with their things out of the camp compound on a prisoner transport at night and outside the compound stood the small house of the third section. The condemned men were taken into a room one at a time and there the camp guards sprang

on them. Their mouths were stuffed with something soft and their arms were bound with cords behind their backs. Then they were let out into the, and their arms were bound with cords behind their backs. Then they were let out into the courtyard where harness carts were waiting. The bound prisoners were piled on the carts from five to seven at a time and driven off to the Gorka, the camp cemetery. On arrival, they were tipped into big pits that had already been prepared and buried alive. Not out of brutality. No, it had been ascertained that when dragging and lifting them, it was much easier to cope with living people than with corpses.

The work went on for many nights at ADAC, and that is how the moral political unity of our party was achieved. If you have a rigid belief system, that's what an ideology is, because its axioms are such that it encompasses all of reality. And then there are details left outside that don't seem to fit into that reality. Well then you ignore them, but what if they're embodied?

What if they're people who are objecting to the way you think? Well, the equivalent to repressing evidence that runs contrary to your theory is the murder of people who object to what you say. And those two things are linked much tighter than you would think. You might think, well, I would never do something like the communist did in the evangelization of my beliefs. But the truth of the matter is, is that in general,

people will do such things if they're granted the opportunity and provided with the proper apparatus. This is Frankl from his accounts of the concentration camps under Nazi Germany. The most ghastly moment of the 24 hours of camp life was the awakening. When at a still nocturnal hour, the three shrill blows of a whistle tore us pittedlessly from our exhausted sleep and from the longings in our dreams. We then began the tussle with our wet shoes into which we could scarcely force our feet, which were sore and swollen with a dima. And then there were the usual moans and groans

about petty troubles such as the snapping of wires which replaced shoelaces. One morning I heard someone who my new to be brave and dignified cry like a child, because he finally had to go out to the snowy marching fields in his bare feet as his shoes were too shrunken for him to wear. In those ghastly moments,

I found a little bit of comfort, a small piece of bread, which I drew out of my pocket and munched with absorbed delight. Solzhenitsyn. Many of the Goulike camps contained two classes of prisoners. Rapists, murderers, and thieves were very well organized in Russia and the Soviet Union, and political prisoners. And because the Soviets believed that the reason that people were thieves, murderers, and

rapists was because of the appalling sociological conditions that they grew up into, they believed they were socially friendly elements who could still be redeemed. So they put them in charge of the camps. And so the political prisoners were at the bottom of the hierarchy. The prisoners ran the camps with minimal supervision. And the camps were often forced labor camps, and forced labor meant do something difficult and pointless until you die. It didn't mean it meant only, secondarily,

produce something of potential value to the state. You saw this with Nazi Germany, too. The Nazis, when they started to lose the Second World War, they could have stopped their Holocaust machinations and used the people they had imprisoned to build implements to further the war effort, which they did to some degree. So they could have used them as slaves.

So this would be the logic. Take the slaves, make the munitions, win the war. Then, after you've won the war, you can run around and mop everybody up. But that isn't what the Nazis did. When they started to lose, instead of doing what you think would be rational in the pursuit of what was hypothetically their goal,

they amped up the killing and took resources away from the war itself. And so the conclusion that's reasonable to draw from that is that the killing was the purpose of the war. All the rest of it was just window dressing and exactly as associates and described in the earlier quotes that I told you, was that ideology was only there to allow the people who were fundamentally motivated towards genocide and destruction, to pretend to themselves that they hadn't become rotten to the absolute core. But when push came to shove and they had to show where their allegiances lie, they weren't even where their allegiances lie. They weren't even valid followers of the Nazi party

because they put the continued pursuit of death above their own survival even as an ideology. And that's how ideology degenerates. And part of the reason for that is that the narrower the box that you stuff yourself into, the weaker your character becomes because there's nothing left of you. You're just a shell that has demons yourself into. The weaker your character becomes, because there's nothing left of you. You're just a shell that has demons in it. But you're still the sort of thing that can suffer.

And so if you cram everything you are into a box, a small, tight box, and you get rid of everything that doesn't fit, you get rid of everything in you that makes life bearable, and then life becomes unbearable. And then if life becomes unbearable, well, then of course you're motivated to do nothing but to take revenge on it. Because why wouldn't you?

If all you were doing was suffering stupidly and meaninglessly, how could you positively, how could you possibly show a positive face to yourself and to the rest of humanity? In cold lower than 60 degrees below zero, work days were written off. In other words on such days, the records showed that the workers had not gone out to work. They were often digging canals on the frozen Siberian prairie by hand. There was one canal. I think it was on the Volga River, but I can't remember precisely.

So Stalin killed 300,000 people in a single winter, digging it by hand. And when it was done, it was so shallow that no ships could use it. The records show that the workers had not gone out to work, but they chased them out anyway. And whatever they squeezed out of them on those days was added to the other days, thereby raising the percentages. And the survival medical section wrote off those who froze to death on such cold days on some other basis. And the ones who were left who could no longer walk,

and were straining every sin you to crawl along and all fours on the way back to camp, the convoy simply shot so that they wouldn't escape before they could come back to get them. This is from William Blake. He'll rose though, art sick, the invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm have found out thy bed of crimson joy, and his dark secret love does thy life destroy. This is Solje Nitsen, fire, fire.

The branches crackle in the night wind of late autumn blows the flame of the bonfire back and forth. The compound is dark. I'm alone at the bonfire, and I can bring it still some more carpenter's shavings. This compound here is a privileged one. So, privileged that it's almost as if I were out in freedom. This is an island of paradise.

This is the Marfino-Charachka, a scientific institute staffed by engineers. Staffed with prisoners in its most privileged period. No one is overseeing me, calling me to a cell, chasing me away from the bonfire. And even then, it is chilly in the penetrating wind. But she, who has already been standing in the wind for hours, her arms

straight down, her head drooping, weeping, and then growing numb and still. And then again, she begs, pitiously, citizen chief, please forgive me, I won't do it again. The wind carries her mone to me, just as if she were moning next to my ear. The citizen chief at the gatehouse fires up his stove and does not answer. This was the gatehouse of the camp next door to us from which workers came into our compound to lay water pipes and repair the old ramshackle seminary building. Across from me, beyond the artfully intertwined, many stranded, barbed wire barricade, and two steps away from the gatehouse, beneath a bright lantern, stood the punished girl, head hanging,

the wind tugging at her gray work skirt, her feet growing numb from the cold, and the thin scarf over her head. It had been warm during the day when they had been digging a ditch on our territory. And another girl, slipping down into a ravine, had crawled her way to the Vladikino highway and escaped. The guard had bungled. And Moscow's city buses ran

right along the highway. When they caught on, it was too late to catch her. They raised the alarm. A mean dark major arrived and shouted that if they failed to catch the girl, the entire camp would be deprived of visits and parcels for a whole month because of her escape. And the women brigateers went into a rage and they were all shouting one of them in particular who kept viciously rolling her eyes. Oh, I hope they catch her, the bitch. I hope they take scissors and clip, clip, take off all her hair in front of the line up. This wasn't something she had thought of herself. This is the way they punished women in the gulag. But the girl who was now standing outside the gate house

in the cold had sighed and said instead, at least she can have a good time out in freedom for all of us. The jailer overheard what she said, and now she was being punished. Everyone else had been taken off to the camp, but she had been set outside there to stand at attention in front of the gatehouse. This had been at 6 p.m., and it was now 11 p.m. She tried to shift from one foot to another, but the guard struck out his head and shouted,

stand at attention horror, or it will be worse for you. And now she was not moving, only weeping. Forgive me, citizen chief, let me into the camp. I won't do it anymore. But even in the camp, no one was about to say to her, all right, idiot, come on in. The reason they were keeping her out there so long was that the next day was Sunday and she would not be needed for work.

Such a straw-blown naive, uneducated slip of a girl. She had been imprisoned for some spool of thread. What a dangerous thought you expressed their little sister. They want to teach you a lesson for the rest of your life. Fire, fire, we fought the war. We looked into the bonfires to see what kind of victory it would be. The wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire. To that flame in you, girl, I promise the whole wide world will read about you.

From Milton. This is from Paradise Lost. Milton wrote Paradise Lost just before the rise of the nation states, and Milton also had the intuition that there was something wrong with rationality, and he identified rationality with the mythology of Satan. And in the mythology of Satan, Satan was represented as the highest angel in God's heavenly kingdom. So you can think about that as the highest psychological function who had rebelled against God and was then cast into hell. And the idea, there's an idea that's being expressed by Milton, he was one of the most, he was one of the foremost poetic geniuses

of the English language, Milton and Shakespeare. And what Milton was trying to understand was what is the nature of evil? And his representation gathered up the dream-like theories of evil that had been collected around all of Western civilization for thousands of years. And his hypothesis was this, evil is the force that believes that its knowledge is complete, and that it can do without the transcendent. And as soon as it makes that claim, it instantly exists in a place that's indistinguishable from hell. And it could get out merely by admitting its error, and it will never do that. For whence but from the author of all ill could spring so deep a mellus to confound the race of mankind in one root, and

earth with hell to mingle and involve, done all despite the great creator. This is from Richard III, Shakespeare, a shell despair, there is no creature loves me. And if I die, no soul will pity me. May, wherefore should they, since that I myself find in myself, no pity to myself? Solzhenitsin describes the reactions and actions of Communist Party members who were devoured by the system, because that often happened. The prison system, the Goulai system, was very indiscriminating. You could land there for good reasons or bad, and the bad reasons were probably better,

because the punishment was more severe if you were imprisoned for your innocence. And Communist Party members often got vacuumed up, and this was ontologically and existentially intolerable for them, because they committed their whole soul to the ideological dogma, and then it's tyrannical aspect, picked them up and destroyed them like they were worth nothing. To say the things were painful for them

is to say almost nothing. They were incapable of assimilating such a blow, such a downfall, and from their own people too, from their own deer party. The typical arrest was, you're at home with your family in your bed, and it's three o'clock in the morning. And the doors kick down and they take you out of your bed in whatever you happen to be wearing and they tell you to say goodbye to your family and give you like 25 seconds to pack

and then you're gone and no one sees you again. They take you to the prison, they take off all your clothes, they shave your head, they have you pick out some random clothes from a pile of clothes, hopefully they don't fit, and then you're tried, you confess, if you will, and you're off to the prison camp. To say that things were painful for them is to say almost nothing. They were incapable of assimilating such a blow,

such a downfall, and from their own people too, from their own dear party, and from all appearances for nothing at all. After all, they had been guilty of nothing as far as the party was concerned, nothing at all. It was painful to them to such a degree that it was considered taboo among them, uncomradly, to ask, what were you imprisoned for?

Ha, they were the only squeamish generation of prisoners. The rest of us with our tongues hanging out couldn't wait to tell the story What were you imprisoned for? Ha, they were the only squeamish generation of prisoners. The rest of us with our tongues hanging out couldn't wait to tell the story to every chance new comer we met and to the whole cell as if it were an anecdote. Here's the sort of people they were. Holga Slyosberg's husband had already been arrested and then had come to carry out a search and arrest her too.

The search lasted four hours. And she spent those four hours sorting out the minutes of the Congress of the bristle and brush industry, of which she had been the secretary until the previous day. The incomplete state of the minutes troubled her more than her children, who she was now leaving forever. Even the interrogator conducting the search could not resist telling her, come on now, save farewell to your children. Here's the sort of people they were.

A letter from her 15 year old daughter came to Yelazaveta, set Kova in the Kazan prison for long term prisoners. Mama, tell me, right to me, are you guilty or not? I hope you weren't guilty because then I won't join the Comsimal, which was the young communist organization, and I won't forgive them because of you. But if you're guilty, I won't write you anymore and I will hate you. And the mother was stricken by remorse in her damp grave-like cell with

its dim little lamp. How could her daughter live without the Comsimal? How could she be permitted to hate Soviet power? Better that she should hate me, and so she wrote, I am guilty, enter the calm Somal. How could it be anything but hard? It was more than the human heart could bear to fall beneath the beloved acts, and then to have to justify its wisdom.

But that's the price a man pays for entrusting his God-given soul to human dogma. Even today, any Orthodox Communist will affirm that set-code acted correctly. Even today, they cannot be convinced that this is precisely, quote, the perversion of small forces, that the mother perverted her daughter and harmed her soul. Here's the sort of people they were. YT gave sincere testimony against her husband, anything to aid the party. Oh, how one could pity them.

If they at least had come to comprehend their former wretchedness, this whole chapter could have been right and quite differently. If today at least they had forsaken their earlier views. But it happened the way Marya Daniela had dreamed it would. If I leave here someday, I'm going to live as if nothing had taken place. Loyalty, in our view, it's just plain pigheadedness. Those devotees to the theories of development

construed loyalty to that development to mean renunciation to any personal development whatsoever. As Nikolai Adamovich Villanchuk said, after serving 17 years, we believed in the party and we were not mistaken. Is this loyalty or pigheadedness? No, it was not for show and not out of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy that they argued in the cells in defense of all the government's actions. They needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own rightness. Otherwise insanity was not far off. This is from paradise lost.

So in this scene Satan is cast into hell and it's because of his rebellion against the transcendent, his idea that he himself is sufficient. This is his statement to his that he himself is sufficient. This is his statement to his crew. Farewell happy fields, where joy forever dwells. Hail horrors, hail in fertile world, and thou profundest hell received thy new possessor. One who brings a mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place,

and in itself can make a heaven of hell, or hell of heaven. What matters where, if I be still the same, and what I should be, all but less than he whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least we shall be free. The Almighty hath not built here for his envy, will not drive us hence. Here we may reign secure and in my choice to reign is worth ambition, though in hell, better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. The existentialists of the late 19th century attempted to diagnose the pathology of the human personality at a deeper level, I believe, than anyone else had ever attempted. And their fundamental conclusion was that

the destruction by rationality of the evolved systems of meaning that people had previously lived within had undermined the psychological strength of each individual, divorced from their own history, that led them to gravitate towards either nihilism, or as a counterposition to gravitate towards totalitarianism. The whole 20th century played out the pendulum swing between nihilism and totalitarianism. And in the background, the existentialists and the psychodynamic theorists were putting forward a theory which was that if people lived up to their own possibility and held on to their own experience as if it were true and did not substitute for that ideological and consensual beliefs

that it would be possible for each person to find a wellspring of meaning that would be a sufficient replacement for what had been lost historically without having to fall into the pitfalls of nihilism or totalitarianism. So you might say, well, nihilism, well, that's one thing because mostly that affects you, although if you're nihilistic, then everyone around you is going to be pulled down as well. But totalitarianism is a whole different issue because what we know now is that once things become ideologically totalitarian, the next step is mass murder. And the next step is mass murder in a manner that makes it appear that the purpose for the ideological rigidification to begin with was the opportunity to participate in mass murder. So you know how Hitler

died. Hitler lost faith in the German people because they were losing the war and so he concluded in the waning stages of World War II that Germany should just be destroyed and fired and everything else that he could possibly consume would go with them and so he died in a bunker underneath Berlin when it was in flames he committed suicide So he died in a bunker underneath Berlin. When it was in flames, he committed suicide. When Europe was in flames, and Hitler was a worshipper of the kind of fire that purifies,

used that mythology of cleansing fire to enter into a terrible pact with the entire nation that he followed and led. And Stalin just didn't just kill individuals that he pulled off the streets. He killed all the engineers and all the doctors because he believed they were wreckers. They killed all the good farmers.

They killed six million Ukrainians. They moved whole nations of people into Siberia and let them die. And there's every bit of evidence there is, suggests that what Stalin was doing was practicing murderous genocide on an ever larger scale and hoping that it would culminate in a thermonuclear war. And we escaped that just by a thread.

The existentialist make the claim, which I think is a remarkable and powerful claim that the way out of those catastrophic situations is not through political action per se or it's not going to be resolved by one party defeating another, or one position defeating another. That's a continuation of the same process that produces the problem. The existential and the psychodynamic answer to this problem is that it's more a disease of the soul than a disease of the state. And that the way to address it is to ensure that you live in a manner that makes you neither

nihilistic nor susceptible to ideological possession. Soul Genetson and other thinkers like him, like Frankl, believed that society was a macrocosm of the individual. Not the other way around, not that the individual's sub-element of society, believed that the choice that each individual made was potentially so powerful in relationship to pathological behavior or honest and thoughtful behavior that a single individual properly developed could stand up against a tyranny and win. And it seems to me, and I thought about this for a very long time, that the lesson of the 20th century is that a single individual can stand up against a tyrant and win, and each of us are single individuals, and the danger of tyranny and the danger of nihilism are not passed. And so, as inheritors of the catastrophic legacy of the 20th century, and there's inhabitants of the new millennium.

Part of your responsibility is to live your own life and to live it honestly and to pay attention to your own experience and not take the easy way out that ideological systems offer you. They're destined to transform themselves into rigid and murderous pathologies. And you offload your responsibility for thinking and acting to them. And then you have to ask yourself, well, what are they? Well, all the evidence suggests that they're not the sort of thing that you want to have in your head. Thank you. you