The Pete Quiñones Show - Reading Ivan Ilyin's 'On Resistance to Evil by Force' w/ Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson - Episodes 11-20

Episode Date: July 25, 2026

8 Hours and 36 MinutesPG-13Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson is a researcher, writer, and former professor of history and political science, specializing in Russian history and political ideology.Here are episodes 11-20 of Pete and Dr. Johnson reading and commentary of Ivan Ilyin's 1925 book, "On Resistance to Evil by Force."Tolstoy's "What is a Jew?"The Lies of Leftism: Ivan Ilyin, Atheism and the Death of Reason in the East and West by Dr. Matthew Raphael JohnsonDr Johnson's PatreonDr Johnson's CashApp - $Raphael71RusJournal.orgTHE ORTHODOX NATIONALISTDr. Johnson's Radio Albion PageDr. Johnson's Books on AmazonJohnson's Law in Action: Venezuela and the Foreign Policy of Mass PresumptionDr. Johnson's Pogroms ArticleThe Orthodox Nationalist: Karl Marx “On the Jewish Question” (1844)Article: Karl Marx’s Theses on the Jews and the Necessity of Free Trade: Zur Judenfrage (1844) by Matthew Raphael JohnsonPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of Unresistance to Evil by Force by Ivan Eileen. Dr. Johnson, what's happening today? I'll tell you what's happening today. For some reason, there's a helicopter with some big thing hanging from it. It looks like a big drill bit, but I don't think that's what it is. Maybe it's what it is. For the last two days, I've been flying around, driving me crazy. I don't know what it's doing.

I live close to railroad tracks. I don't know if there's a connection. But you start getting paranoid when it's like day three. And he's still wandering around up there. But it looks like a big drill bit. And I saw him knocking down some trees before. Maybe that's what he's doing. I don't know.

He went right over the house a couple of times. I was doing a lawn yesterday. He went right over the house. And I don't know. I don't know. It's, I hope he's having a good time up there. I have nothing to say about it anymore.

I'm not one of these paranoid guys, but it does get you a little worried after three days, two and a half days. You could always wander out there and see if there's anybody you could ask. Well, I live very close. I love the train tracks. I don't mind them at all. But their sole purpose is to feed the power station that's not very far away.

It's massive. It's massive. So I get the impression. that this area is very, very highly patrolled. You know, this is a high security area, so to speak, for that reason. So I don't know if that has any relevance, but I think the thing's a drill bit. And I think he's chopping down trees. But he's only done that a little bit.

Out of the three days he's been there, I've seen him doing once. I don't know. All right. Well, you know, as long as a helicopter's not black, I think you should be okay. I can't tell what color. Oh, here it comes. I can't tell what color it is. I think it's dark blue and white.

All righty. Went the other direction. Let's jump back in. Hell was going on here. After a week off, let's jump back into this. I think people have missed us. We're solid. Evil enters a soul much more easily by stealth than by violence

and destruction. It is often more expedient for it to don a mask than to immediately reveal its own disgusting nature. Therefore, criminals wishing to overcome good, not only rape and kill, but also praise evil, vilify good, lies, slander, flatter, propagandize, and agitate. Then, having acquired authority, they command and forbid, excluding coerce with threats, they tempt, sexually intoxicating the eye, ear, and mind, pandering to man's evil instincts and inflaming them to a state of passionate fervor. They awaken in souls the feeling of resentment, envy, hostility, vindictiveness, hatred, and malice, put people in burdensome, humiliating, unbearable living conditions. They bribe, honor, and try to undermine in the soul the feeling of self-worth, respect, and trust of people to each other,

accustomed to evil by simple repetition, shameless example, imperceptible infection, suggestion, undermining of the will, instilling vicious mental mechanisms, and strive to cover all with obvious success, impunity, the din of an intoxicated feast. Yeah, he's a very good writer. But understand, this is Berlin, 1925.

we know what Berlin was in 1925 know the condition of Berlin in 1925 I mean it's not just a Soviet Union it's not just Tolstoy it's also what he's seeing around him Berlin you know it's not just you know the state and the economy had collapsed public morals had collapsed

and it was you know a Jewish movement pornography and open, you know, prostitution, all this, had a welcome home in Berlin, I'm sure other cities too. You should see, hear how they praise this in the academy. It makes you nauseous, but people wonder why Hitler was so popular. And whenever these guys got into trouble, where'd they go, the USSR? As if to prove his point.

And remember that. So it's not just all these. And also remember that in the right after the revolution, probably around now, maybe a couple of years earlier, you had Alexander Colentai creating the sexual revolution in the USSR. I mentioned her before. She was purged eventually, in God. And the family had fallen up, you know, easy divorce, abortion, the so-called community of wives, which every revolutionary movement

from the radical Protestants in Northern Europe to then has that as one of their well community of wives just means I can screw anyone I want and it was doing so much damage to the economy people weren't showing up to work there was so much contempt and anger and chaos that they had to stop it

in other words that was too radical for Lenin and Trotsky And she eventually lost her job and is just kind of a curiosity now. But she is always considered one of the first early feminists and someone who young women should aspire to be. That's a exact quote. But so he's referring to many things here. And he was living in 1925, Berlin.

He was he was witness to a lot of things. Stuff we take for granted. But then it was just. outrageous imposition. And we know who stopped it, at least for a while. Vicious violence and murder, of course, thicken the disgusting atmosphere of this villainous procession, and is the main manifestation of evil and its most destructive consequence. This is precisely the qualitative perversion and architectonic decay of the living spirit. Violence itself, for all its outward brutality, carries its poison not so much to the body as to the spirit, murder itself, for all its tragic

irreversibility, is intended not so much for those killed as for those remaining alive. Both instill fear and intensify the effect of temptation. They shake the will, awaken passions, and distort reason. It's very important to note that a later, well, I guess it was happening now, but when the Soviet Union was finally established, you know, you didn't have, peasant uprisings, but not like it was under Lenin. The concept was to have these arrests being random. There's an intense psychological impact when you don't know it could be you tomorrow.

You can't arrest all your enemies. That would be pretty much the whole country. But it was a psychological. The Soviets were brilliant in that matter, diabolically so. Unfortunately, the right wing was way behind on the psychological aspect of things, except for Elaine, of course. He saw what was going on. Violence.

Let's say if you get, you get, you know, you're a husband, you get slapped by your wife or punched by her, worse. It isn't so much that it hurt. It's, oh my God, she hates me this much. She's willing to do that? It's a psychological element, not the physical element. And in the previous paragraph, evil entering the soul by stealth, that's how evil functions. Now, I think today it's just out in the open, they don't care. But generally speaking, it never says, you know, you know, there's a lot of fake Lenin quotes out there.

And you know they're fake because you have Lenin calling himself evil or his movement evil. No one's ever going to say that about themselves. you know that the the the protocols and nonsense have have that in there and no one's going to say that about themselves but no they they are the fulfillment of the enlightenment at the end of history this is going to be an era of peace and plenty until our enemies are destroyed of course and you know revolutions of any type create these very confused passions. But he says he, resentment, envy, hostility, vindictiveness, hatred, malice. And it brings to power the worst men because they're the ones who don't care, the sociopath.

The sociopath has a huge advantage in that there's no good and evil with him. He just doesn't care. And early Soviet Marxism was very much like that. If it's for the revolution, it's good. And they did things that the whites would never even dream of doing, not just against their enemies, but to make sure that their own organization was totally unified ideologically. And they were willing to, you know, cut down infantry units if they were not fully on board with Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism. but of course it was all for the future

this vague future that neither Marx nor Lenin never talked about they never said I still it always it's only struck me over the last few years what political theorists doesn't talk about what's going to happen when their ideology is imposed

that's their whole thing no no it's always negative it's always about capitalism or feudalism or something like that it's never about they leave that open Karl Marx has this famous line. He says, I remember Marx-Rangles. He says, I'm not going to write recipes for the kitchens of the future. That's his line.

He says, and he means that, you know, it's going to have its own personality. I think it also means that I can't tell you that you would never support us if that were the king. Remember, the communists, I have some of their electoral speeches and what they promised the world. and one of their big promises was giving land to the peasants. Now, the problem is the land was always in peasant hands. You didn't have a land in oligarchy in Russia. So, and talking about killing the landlords, well, they were their own landlords. So what the hell is he talking about?

But why would you even talk about giving property to anybody when you don't believe in private property? the only time that land was granted to the peasantry was under national socialist systems. I think of the Chavez movement in Venezuela, my favorite military dictator Velasco in Peru, Park in South Korea, Hathaz al-Assad in Syria, who broke the back of the of the landed oligarchy. They're the ones. They're national socialists. You know, it's not just Hitler.

They were national socialists fully, almost identically. You know, they differ because they live in different countries, but they're not fascist, though. Very different ideology. You know, it was a clown anyway, but they were not fat. They were national socialists, very different kind of thing. Communists, liberals, especially at the time, 1925, Berlin. You know, I used to give the, I gave the example about, you know, the alcoholic who's forced to work in a bar. He has no choice.

You can't work anywhere else. You can't be anywhere out. It's not just that he's watching everyone have a good time. It's also that they're telling him that alcoholism doesn't really exist. It's in your mind. Come on with us. Have a great time. There is no such thing.

You're too hard on yourself. You know, what level temptations. That's what it's like. I think that's what it's like, you know, sexually. financially for people living in the U.S. today. Certainly going to campus. So these are, you know, this is really what he means. And what was going on in Berlin in 1925 is something we can relate to as the same group of people.

It was ended, and the country was turned from a third world backwater to a first world powerhouse in three years, which is extraordinary. And part of the victory was to get rid of exactly this crap. This is why it must be recognized that external violence manifests evil and strengthens its actions, but evil is not at all determined or exhausted by external violence. This is a correct understanding of the relationship between physical coercion, violence, and evil. Yeah, of course there's going to be violence turned to. wrong uses, incorrect uses, immoral uses. That happens a lot.

But that's only one way evil manifests itself, and it's only a subset of violence in terms of physical coercion. Violence is a word that has a negative... I don't think in Russian, but... In English, it has this immediate negative connotation. Violence is... You think, you know, something violent happened next door,

you automatically thinking something negative. But that's not the case. That's really not what the word means. It can be used for good, and it can be used in a loving way. And I think Yilin has established that already. Chapter 8. A statement of the problem. All these preliminary studies and considerations,

clearing the way and clarifying the perspective, now allow us to turn to the formulation of the main problem. The spiritual permissibility of resistance to evil by means of physical coercion and suppression. It is clear that the problem cannot be posed until the real objective quantities hidden behind it are established and defined. How can one discuss evil without identifying

and revealing its true nature? What can one say about coercion if one confuses it with violence and fails to see its spiritual function, its motives, or purpose? Is it permissible to invoke the nature of goodness, assuming its essence is generally known, and failing to notice that it is being simplified and distorted in the discourse,

what could possibly result from this except an untenable question and an untenable answer? Here he comes. Here he comes. He's off in a distance, but he's coming. Anyway, yeah, he does make a distinction, though. He's allowing violence to be vaguely negative. Physical coercion, this was brutal to translate. I didn't, the machine couldn't do it.

Physical coercion and violence. You know, physical coercion can be done with love. But until you have these things defined, until you have the, and it's not easy to do, that's why it's taken so long to get here. You can't talk about resisting evil by force until you know what resisting means, until you know what evil means,

until you know what force means. And so much my career is that you can't assume that people know that. They always import whatever they want into those questions. You know, either knee-jerk reactions or just, you know, fallacious understandings or arguments, I should say.

So here he's gone the other side. He said, okay, violence is negative. He's going to allow that to happen. But coercion, different stories. So he makes that linguistic distinction very similar. Yes, there is loving violence. He doesn't like using that phrase. So instead, he uses coercion.

And you do it, you have. have to do it out of love, not out of anger, even if you have a good reason to be angry. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie with Jamie Fox. No, I can't think of the name. I'm so terrible at this. His wife and child were murdered and he went on a killing spree. Anyway, that's the concept. And he started killing innocent people. and that's the issue. It has to be tightly controlled.

You can't let your emotions get away with you. And it's extremely, you know, that's tough to do. That's where discipline comes in. That's where the spiritual world comes in. And you can't convince yourself that you did it for a good reason, when you didn't do it for a good reason. It's very easy to do that. I did it.

I'm doing it for your own good. You know, something like that. But it is. That doesn't mean that violence can't, coercion can't be used for your own good. If someone doesn't understand anything but violence, what else you're going to do? And that's where Tolsoi fails completely. In order to correctly formulate a problem and correctly solve it, not only a definiteness of objective vision is needed, a tense effort of attention is also necessary to

retain that given set of conditions outside of which the problem itself falls apart or is removed. Every problem has meaning only in the context of giving quantities and their correct empirical perception. Outside of this, it falls and becomes meaningless, and then the one who nevertheless continues to resolve it in this form finds himself in the ridiculous position of a person who supposedly labors over imaginary quantities and then enthusiastically proclaims the absolute truth. It makes sense to examine the problem of the admissibility of resistance to evil through physical coercion and suppression only if the following conditions are present. Okay.

Let's start, and I'll probably say something after each. These are kind of long, but there's a few of them, and let's, sorry, I'll say something after each number. Okay. First, genuine evil must be present. It cannot be its semblance, not its shadow, not a phantom, not external disaster. not external disasters, not error, not weakness, or a disease of an unfortunate sufferer. There must be an evil will pouring itself out in external action. Before the Court of Legal Consciousness, this will be a will directed against the law,

and since spirituality constitutes the essence of law and the existence of the living spirit is the purpose of law, then this will be an anti-spiritual will in source, in direction, in purpose, and in means. before the face of a moral consciousness this will be a will directed against the living unity of people and since love is the essence of this unity and love is a very unifying force then this will be an antisocial will in source in direction in purpose and in means when a malicious will is expressed in external action the question of resisting evil through violence oppression arises clearly this question must be immediately resolved wherever internal compulsion proves powerless, an evil will emerges as an internally possessed external force, that is, where it manifests itself as spiritually blind malice, fierce, aggressive, godless, shameless, spiritually corrupting and stopping at no means, where, consequently, the composition of moods and actions is actually present, for which the mercy of the gospel has determined the least punishment is drowning with a millstone around the neck.

You want me to keep going? Yeah, until we get to the second one. Okay. It is clear that the interpretation of the present evil is an illness, a delusion, a weakness, a weakness, an accidental fall, and the like does not resolve, but removes problem posed, and then calls for persuasive non-resistance turn out to be a non-answer to the question, but a hidden evasion of the question. You know, this is an example of a certain type of analytic philosophy, which I was subject to in the Nebraska philosophy Department, but we understand why that's the case.

It's like talking about using the word racism, which has no meaning. You have to set out exactly and precisely what you mean, which, of course, the regime will never do. not that anyone cares about the word anymore anyway. Same thing for anti-semitism or any of these terms. And you know that I did the translating here when I have all these words in brackets. And this one gave me a headache. Well, they all gave me a headache. But so the main thing here is that you have to understand what evil is.

It can't be just something that's against your interests, something you don't like, something that upset you, something that triggers you. It has to be genuine evil defined here as something that destroys the living unity of the nation. Something that divides the people as a whole. Nationalism and this unity revolves around humility. You know, we have to learn to listen to others. We can't, you know, we're not all, we all can't be in charge. we all do our part whether we get our picture in the paper or not

you all do our part and we we have to have humility or else nothing the whole thing falls apart and then again he could have made his point in like two sentences but

when he gets agitated he just strings out these adjectives but evil in this case or the most extreme version is something that is blind. He says blind malice, fears, aggressive violence. When we use violence or coercion, whatever you want to call it, we cannot be blind. We have to know precisely why we're doing it. We have to be able to defend it rationally, not just to ourselves, but anyone who notices it. and what Tolstoy, you know, I read him, you know, many years ago, I really refreshed myself for this segment or this book.

And he doesn't really get into the question of what do you do with people that refuse to listen, that don't understand, you know, persuasion. and I'm always reminded of the defund the police movement that the regime really tried to put out there they're so obsessed with supporting crime for the sake of the chaos it causes and having psychologists go to the Cripps headquarters and talk to them that's what they said

and there's something they had an even legend and that they wanted to destroy the society. Tolstoy, I don't think he wanted that. I think, you know, but to be Tolstoy, you have to believe that everyone is rational, like he is. I think he was wrong. He was a rational man.

He was very intelligent. But because he's like that, and his friends are like that, doesn't mean that everyone is like that. He was a little sheltered in that regard. He did have quite a life. but you have no choice but to believe that every human being, unless they're, you know, demented, you know, retard or something like that,

you have to believe that every living man is rational, and if they're not, that you can then talk to them, persuade them, and bring the reason out of them. And that is, I mean, to understate the problem, It is an extremely naive point of view. He doesn't have an answer for this. And now, I wrote the sentence. The sentence here, I mean, I'd write it.

It's clear that the interpretation of the present evil as an illness, delusion, a weakness, an accidental fall. Does that reason? Well, that could have been written yesterday. You hear the defense lawyer say it all the time. He was mentally ill. He was beaten up as a child. he made a mistake and he says that's totally missing the point

and so it's really extraordinary how contemporary his writing is and it makes him very relatable unfortunately with Tolstoy I can't relate to him because I wasn't a rushed landowner but you know

and the way that Tolstoy writes he really claims he is the final interpreter This is what Christianity is. He speaks like a synod would speak. There's tremendous, tremendous arrogance. I think the church is communicating it was a bad idea. It just brought more attention to him like a stricent effect.

Obviously, he was out of the church at that point. He was a Judaizer at that point. No kidding. You know, he was excommunicated. I think that, well, the church was very popular and trusted. And so if he's kicked out, excommunication actually meant something back then. you know, you had no standing in society after that.

But he didn't worry about it because he owned land and he had, you know, he was more or less self-sufficient. But it's pretty incredible. But, you know, I have no doubt that at the time, most people in fact were rational. It was a far healthier society than what we have today. Today we have a society where rational people are the exception, not the rule. So now what do we do? You know, and that's why he could be writing this. If he wrote this, if he was alive and wrote this yesterday, we wouldn't have any, you know,

it's very contemporary and it's extraordinary for that reason. Second, as long as evil is not perceived by anyone, as long as no one has seen the external act and has not discerned the malice hidden behind it, then no one has either the basis nor the reason to pose and resolve the problem of external resistance. This is precisely why many people, burdened in advance by the presumptuous necessity of an answer, turn away from evil and prefer not to see it, either by evading the information or benevolently interpreting it in the best sense or hiding behind the impossibility and the impermissibility of judging one's neighbor, or refirming the faith that malice is not inherent in people at all. He frees himself from

its burdens, dulls its severity and torment, and deprives himself of the right to participate in its discussion. And as a result, all his judgments on this issue turn out to be either incompetent, like the judgments of a man born blind about additional colors, or scholastic, like the judgment of a reasoner about untried imaginary circumstances? Well, let me say something here. It's one thing to catch someone in the act and take violent action. You know, no one denies that. There's a reason that the law gives lesser sentences to a man who shot,

well, having sex with his wife. every once in a while that happens. The sentences are not as long as it would be for murder. And sometimes the jury doesn't see it as murder at all. You can't hear it, you know, secondhand, third hand, fourth hand. So judging one's neighbor. I love that. We can't judge each other.

The point here is, I said a common cop out. Yeah, it is. Well, I can't judge. well isn't that convenient so you don't have to go through the mental struggle of understanding what's going on and doing something about it you just give that slogan and walk away and let everyone else deal with it go ahead whether or not atrocities should be physically suppressed only one who has seen real evil who has perceived and experienced it who has received and carried within himself its diabolical burns who has not turned away but has immersed his gaze in the image of satan

who has allowed the image of evil to be truly and faithfully reflected within himself and endured it without becoming infected, who has perceived evil but not accepted it. For one who has accepted evil has become infected by it, to a certain extent has become it, and thereby transformed from a resisting subject into a subject that must be resisted. It is for him to resolve the question of methods of resistance. one who has not accepted evil has truly known it but has not become it. He possesses it in his spiritual experience, sees its nature, understands its path and laws, and is therefore able to correctly pose and resolve the problem of resistance, having experienced,

rejected and gained wisdom. He has thereby acquired the power of vision and the right to judge. This is a very profound point. I firmly believe I'm one of these people. I have faced true evil. And it changes you forever. But people who are sheltered, people who don't, you know,

people don't have a lot of problems. They're in no position to judge what others do. My favorite example here is university professors sitting in their very comfortable offices condemning someone like General Pino shame. well, what was he facing? He was facing extreme violence in the streets. A psycho dictator, which led the legislature to ask him to take over, even though he only got 39% of the vote or something like that.

You haven't seen that. You haven't seen that face up, right right in your face. You haven't had to deal with it. so you're in no position to say what it was like to be in a position to do something about it. You know, you've never been in a situation where there's riots every day and the society is collapsing around you. This is you can't go into it. This is your home. How dare you judge someone like that who was successful?

All these guys in Latin America. I have a book out on the subject. I remember the name even, dictators of military leaders of Latin America where I defend them. I defend them in very similar ways. These are academics who have not seen this. They have not seen what these men have seen.

In Indonesia, for example, before the coup of Suharto, the savior of Asia, one of the generals who took part in that coup had his little girl blown up by a communist bomb. It was meant for him, of course. See, they haven't, they don't know what that's like. Of course he's going to take, you know, they're sheltered people, intellectually soft people.

And what he's saying here is how dare they judge what someone like that is going to do, especially when it's successful and popular, as it was in most cases, military, you know, is very patriotic and usually coming from the lower classes and all that. They create, you know, land reform and stuff that the communists would never, ever have given. So that's very, very, this is a very powerful point. Someone who's sheltered, someone who doesn't know what evil is, has not seen it in his mind. He really shouldn't be talking about it.

Third, the presence of genuine love for good in the questioning and decisive soul is needed. The problem of resistance to evil is not an abstract, but a practical problem. Its formulation, discussion, and solution presupposed that a person not only perceives, contemplates, and studies the actions of people, but evaluates them, connecting them with a living, accepting, and rejecting attitude, chooses, prefers, and connects them connects his well-being, his joy, his life and his destiny with what he himself is chosen and preferred. Here it is not enough to experience and perceive. One must love and enter into a living identity. It is not enough to think. One must sincerely and genuinely feel. It is not

enough to speak. One must rejoice or be indignant. If a person who does not know if a person who understands the difference between good and evil cannot even perceive the problem of resisting evil, then someone who knows this difference but remains indifferent to it may perceive this problem, but will be unable to resolve it. For it is revealed only to someone who grasp it with the primary central sense of their soul, who understands it because they cannot help but understand it and cannot help but grasp it, because the question of goods victory over evil is a question of their personal existence. Right. So there's two elements now. One and two. It's not just that you have evil in front of your face that permits that kind of action. Again, I think he's speaking more politically, but it applies to anyone. And I use the military coups as an example, especially in Latin America, the 60s and 70s. They see the evil. They see what the communists are.

Back in the drug dealers, you know, killing innocent people all the time. Constant violence. The economy collapsing. Okay, he sees it in his face. He sees it right, right there. This is his home. But he also has to love it. He has to be a patriot.

He has to love his nation. He has to love the good and know what the good is. It's not just a matter of reacting to evil. That's why the second part is very important. That's third part is very important. it's extremely significant. He has to know evil. He also has to know the good.

And both of those things he had to have experienced. It is of immense significance that those two things have to work together. True resistance to evil is not limited to condemning it or exhausting itself with its rejection. No, it confronts a person with the question of life and death. demanding an answer as to whether it is worth living in the presence of victorious evil, and if so, how exactly they will live to prevent its victory? If the triumph of blasphemy and embittered contempt doesn't stifle a person and extinguish the light in their eyes,

it means their soul lacks the foundation for a true understanding and resolution of the problem of resisting evil. For this problem is formulated thus, What should one do who truly loves the elements of spirit and love, yet witnesses its desecration, perversion, and extinction. Are the unloving competent to judge the tragedy of the lover? Does it make sense to interrogate the indifferent as to what they would do if they witnessed the destruction of that to which they are indifferent?

This is why, when the spiritual nihilist and the lazy relativist posed a problem of resisting evil through physical coercion and suppression, they obliterate it by their very formulation and offer it a non-solution. relativism, the ultimate cop out, I don't believe that they're actually full relativists out there. There's no way. They get angry just like everybody else. They may even use violence like everybody else.

They don't really believe it. It's just something that they say in an argument, something that justifies whatever it is they're doing. But those who refuse to act suddenly adopt relativism, because then it justifies. There's an intellectual justification for their non-action. And so, but I love the concept here. The triumph of blasphemy and embittered contempt

doesn't stifle a person and extinguished the light of their eyes. It means their soul lacks the foundation for a true understanding and resolution the problem of resisting evil. That's an incredible line. Now, in 1925, Berlin, it may be shocking to see someone like that. In 26, Pennsylvania, it's not.

Most people are like this. Most people don't know what blasphemy is. My debates on Christianity or anything like that really revolve around them not knowing what the words mean, not knowing what the true doctrine is and what the words imply. 90% of what I talk about is that. So they're not upset by blasphersoners. me because maybe I don't know what's being blasphemed. But he's saying more than that.

You know, indifference, yes, it may be a sign of a weak-willed person. It also may be a sign of someone who just doesn't want to deal with it. And so they claim indifference and relativism, so they don't have to fight. Because, you know, in certain cases, you make it hurt. You know, taking back your neighborhood from gangs or something like that. everyone, all these military men who took over government. These guys don't want to do that. They know that it harms military readiness.

They have enough, they have enough to do, and they have enough problems just being in the army. They do not want to take over a government. They do it because they've experienced evil and they love their nation. You know, I've been talking about the fake prime minister of Armenia, Pasinian, who deliberately lost the war against Azerbaijan a few years ago.

The fact that the military hasn't overthrown him speaks to this issue. They can't complain and absolutely do nothing, meekly go along with what he's done. The entire Nagorno-Karabakh region was lost to Azerbaijan, to the Muslims. They wiped out everything Christian in that area, but burnt down the churches, everything. and all because of him.

You know, it's been, you know, that's, so that's a, that's a huge part of this as well. Now, he's an idiot. He honestly is. He really is a dummy, you know. It's got to be exhausting to control, to be their hand, his handler because he needs everything laid out in front of him. But the army doesn't overthrow him. if there's ever a time, a legitimate military coup, it's now. 100,000 Armenians had to flee their country and move back to Armenian.

That's not enough, and he did nothing. In fact, he even justified it. But they really can't complain because they are in a position. Even though he's purged, the officers and all that, they still have a conscience, don't they? at least some of them do. There's been no attempt to get rid of this guy, all the rigged elections, everything else. If there's ever a time for a military coup, it's now. And they would be incredibly popular for doing it.

They'd be heroes in Armenia and Russia. But something is stopping them. And it's very hard to tell what. It might just be the confusion, might just be the fact that he's purged him so many times. It might be certain insecurity over that. But now they have an obligation here. They have an obligation. And again, they have the same thing.

They love Armenia. They've seen evil in action. They do nothing. I think the same thing goes for Ukraine. I think the military should have overthrown that idiot years ago. That would have saved so many lives. Russia was quite willing to forgive everything. and start trading with them again.

There was a lot of money to be made there, but they refused. There's a lot of reasons. We could speculate us to the reasons why they did nothing. We're sworn to support the government. Well, you're sworn to protect the country. Not to go along with whatever domestically and foreign enemies. Domestic enemies and foreign enemies is the oath. I think all military state.

And yet, they do nothing. Fourth, the presence of a volitional attitude toward the world process in the questioning and deciding soul must, but exist. Should that be must exist? Yeah, sorry about that. That's okay. The practical nature of the question presupposes not only the presence of living unity, but also the capacity for volitional action, and moreover, for volitional action not only

within one's own personality, but also beyond it. in relation to others, to their evil activities, and to the world process, a process in which they are organically included. This process, when perceived with love and will, appears as a great evolving struggle in which a living and healthy spirit cannot help but participate on the side of good. It cannot help but love decide and strain, promoting one and hindering another.

Well, if you didn't know he was a Hegelian, you know it now. right wing Higelian he uh oh by the way I want to say something and I got some very very good comments about um connecting Hegel to to orthodoxy uh hagel is useful I don't go to him for spiritual advice metaphysically uh and and understanding the world yes I get there's many things about him that are very understanding the state now things develop the justifications for nationalism. Well, that's why I go to Hagle. I don't go to Hagle for ascetic advice, you know. So, and I mentioned on my own radio show before, excellent questions. I don't know who sent them to me or who saw them, but I don't remember anything. But that's a, that's a quick answer there,

because he's clearly showing his Higelianism here. Now, he's talking about, A nation is organic. The state is mechanistic. Organism and mechanism are opposed to each other. Now, the state has no choice but to be mechanistic. Maybe not the crown. Crown's a different story. But he can't function without a substantial government apparatus.

But what he's, there's two metaphors. One would be simply, you know, we're the white, blood cells of society who can identify evil and or a pathological element and try to destroy it. The other one which may be more apt, especially today, is we're the chemotherapy. Let's assume that chemotherapy is the right way to go. We're the chemotherapy and we're fighting this horrible tumor that's been imposed on us in this society. Yes, it's going to be nasty. You've got to vomit a lot.

It's going to be horrible. But let's just say that's the only way to do it. and there's no choice. I think that's a better idea here for the organic nature of things. The old medieval justification for capital punishment was chopping off a, say, a foot or a hand that's got gangrene. That's what justifies it. It's not just a matter of fulfilling oaths and stuff like that. it's you know

when you have a pathological element that can be chopped off you have no choice but to chop it off it's going to spread to everything and everybody the human body

was always anatomy was always a big thing in medieval understandings of and I think it should be and it should be for us now and that's how

that's the understanding here but the process when preceding with love and will, in other words, courage, you want to approach it, appears as a great evolving struggle. The healthy and living spirit cannot help participate on the sign of good. And he's talking about the best of our people.

And we all know that it's going to be extremely difficult, that we've given up a lot to do this. But we both have faced evil. I'm not there with us all the way I thought me and you, faced evil, as well as understand the good in a very, very defensible way, very intellectual way. And therefore, we have an obligation to take action. People who don't understand what those terms mean or who look at you when you say there's organic and mechanistic, they have no idea what you're talking about. Well, thank God they don't act, unless they're being led, but thank God they don't act because they simply don't

know. And that's what he's saying here. If it is not worth asking what a relativist should do, that it is completely absurd to pose the question of what a man should do who is weak-willed. A man who consciously derives his will from participation in the external world, or who restrains it from influencing the mental and spiritual life and mental and physical activity of others, has neither the basis nor the right to pose and resolve the problem of resisting evil through external coercion. For from the very beginning, he extinguishes or withdraws within himself that spiritual capacity, the will, and spiritual orientation toward the volition of others that alone can comprehend this problem. He should not pose it because it does not exist for him.

He should not resolve it because it is predetermined for him in a negative sense. And all he can say truly about it is an open admission of his incompetence and a principal decision to refrain from participating in its discussion. Again, an extremely profound point. And I think this one's relatively easy to grasp. Relativists have no right to take action. They have a right to, and Edmund Burke actually says this in Britain many years previously, many centuries previously.

They have a right not to take action because they don't know. You know, if you don't understand even basic issues, you shouldn't be voting. That kind of thing. You know, there's only a certain group of people who really understand what's going on. All history is made not by majorities, but by determined and fanatical minorities. I don't care where you go. These are the people who bring about these changes. And I say fanatical, not in a negative sense, because we all know,

fanatics are the only ones to ever get anything done. They're willing to stay all night and talk and fight, do what's necessary. But everyone else wants to go home. I've experienced that with organizations. So is you. So of you. Fanatic is not a negative, pejorative term in this case. How I'm talking about it.

So he's talking about a spiritual aristocracy here. That's very important. We can't expect everyone to understand this stuff. you know we can't go you know talk to our neighbor and get all upset that he doesn't understand that he's being ruled by the jews okay it's understandable why he wouldn't grasp that maybe we could bring him along but until he grasped it and then he shouldn't really been talking about this though he has a right not to act and that's the important concept here finally the problem of resisting evil through external coercion actually arises and is

correctly posed only under the condition that internal self-compulsion proves powerless to restrain a person from committing evil. Physical force must be experienced as necessary, but beyond this, there is no point in posing the problem. It's very, very profound, and we know this, and sometimes this is something that experience and wisdom, there is no calculation that lets us know this. You have to try everything. You have to try to discuss things with them. take stuff away, and still, they remain adamant. That's when physical violence then at that point is justified. In reality, there are only two possible outcomes, either complacent inaction or physical resistance. In the first case, seeing that mental compulsion is ineffective and that the

crime will still occur, he either ceases to struggle entirely and steps aside or continues to use this means, which is obviously doomed to failure. In the second case, he goes beyond mental compulsion and directs or limits the villainous will through physical force. Clearly, anyone who advances a third opinion and admits or discovers the validity of self-compulsion and mental compulsion in this case does not resolve the problem, but extinguishes it. He demonstrates not the spiritual prohibition of a practically necessary suppression, but its practical uselessness and thereby removes the problem by evading it. I did a paper on, I did a, yeah, there's a little bit of a delay there.

Sorry about that. I don't know, should we stop here or no? Well, I mean, I think that we should probably stop the reading there, but I'm sure you have something to comment on there. Yes, in fact, in fact, I do. You know, this paragraph reminded me of President Bukle in El Salvador. I think I mentioned him before. He's elected facing a society that has disintegrated.

It's controlled by some of the most powerful gangs in the universe. The state has failed to take concerted action. Now, in my paper, I say the following. But we talk in the normal sense of habeas corpus, the Miranda rights, that kind of thing. That's for basically peacetime. That exists when crime isn't all that bad. But when it's organized, when they flood the courts, when the courts were helpless, or terrified, because most of them were shot, as they were in Colombia in the 80s,

they had to wear masks, if you remember that, they had to wear the ski mask. didn't help them. Then I don't want to hear about that stuff. That's why militaries take over, but in this case, they didn't have to. President Pocalee declared a state of emergency, and that stuff didn't function. He wants to reach a point where he can go back to the normal way that courts operate. But that can't happen when gangs outnumber the security service. They have more money than the security service.

armed in the security service. I mean, it was the same thing for gangs in America. You know, in a fair battle, they could take the police with no problem. They're so well armed and they don't have to worry about the law. But that's the problem. They shouldn't, at some point, shouldn't have to worry about the law when it gets to extreme circumstances where the state is becoming, it's disintegrating as it was in El Salvador. Needless to say, world opinion condemned him.

His approval rating now is like 93% last I checked. He destroyed the gangs. He simply let the army go and the police go, you know, take care of this. They know where everything is. They know where all these guys are. You know, they only understand force. They either are in prison or they fled the country. He won.

And when anyone wins there, you know the U.S. is going to condemn them. And, of course, that includes a drug war. drug war doesn't exist because I don't remember any war where every soldier had a lawyer. On Iwo Jima, I don't think the Japanese infantry or Marines had a lawyer there discussing whether I should get shot or not. It's a war when that stuff is put aside. If it's not put aside, the country's going to be destroyed. That's what his state of emergency basically is. And of course, it can condemnation.

You have governments all over Latin America, imitating them, doing something like that. like this. And he, in the minute he did that, the country came back to life. All the people were doing all these festivals and stuff that they couldn't do before because they were terrified all over the place. That's why he's, you know, and the economy recovered. That's all they needed was these scumbags out of the way. MS-13 being massive in El Salvador. And, you know, he built that ginormous prison. And because it's possible that a few people, you innocent people were included. I don't know how they could be innocent if they're associated with the gang somehow. The regime puts out the stupidest arguments against him. And I'm very

happy about that paper. It needs to be said. And I also had to get into the question is why the regime is so pro-crime, why they really romanticize criminals. But Bukila was facing a society falling apart. He had all the ingredients that we just talked about here. See, evil. If that wasn't evil, then nothing is. I mean, they, they're kidnapping people for ransom. You know, it was, um,

all the time, of course, drugs. They saw, he saw evil. Everything else had failed. And it was a patriot. He loves this country. You want to go through all this unless you love your country. The same thing occurred in the Philippines with my president,

uh, um, uh, um, uh, who I absolutely love, again, condemned beyond belief by the U.S. government because he won his drug war in a couple weeks, Chinese in the opium war. They won their drug war too, invaded by the British in the name of free trade. Whenever a country wins its drug war, destroys its criminal element, they will be condemned if not invaded. Anyway, the point being Bukhala is an excellent example

of someone who fits this mode. Now, it's not like other presidents were not, as he says, you're complacent inaction. They might as well have been. Everything they did failed, miserable. It got so bad that the government even went to the MS-13 and said, please don't kill that many people

as a Sunday, you know. And why would they respect that? How weak would the government have to be? I'm not doing that. The only other option is physical resistance, in this case, a blitzkrieg. It was fast. It took them totally off guard. That's the only way to win, and he did it.

And, you know, how to hell could you be a pacifist in that case? The only way these guys were going to be stopped is through violence. I remember when deterrenting the Philippines said, gave addicts permission to kill their dealers, which is pretty brilliant, if he asked me, a hundred thousand dealers turned themselves in, turned themselves in. It doesn't take much. Once they know that the state means business, they're going to, you know, they're going to fall apart. And the same thing in El Salvador. And that's an excellent example to explicate what he's talking about here, very, very significant.

in my opinion. All righty. We'll come back and pick this up. This was a long one and this was a deep one, but this was, this is the important part. This is where I think people are, this is a part so people are waiting for. Yes, I agree. I encourage, yep, there's a little bit of a delay. I encourage everyone to go and to support Dr. Johnson's work.

Please go to the show notes. Please go to the descriptions on the video. donate to his work and, you know, Sean, how much you appreciate not only this one, but, you know, if you haven't given him at least a tip for 200 years together, what's wrong with you? So, yeah, we'll be back in a few days with the next episode. I appreciate your help and I appreciate this audience. Absolutely. Thank you, Dr. Johnson.

So I'll see in a couple days. All right, my friend. Bye-bye. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of Unresistance to Evening, by force by Ivan Eileen, Dr. Johnson. How are you doing today? Well, I don't want to alarm anybody, but my co-host today, I'm not known for having co-host, is cocaine totalitarian, who is unfortunately asleep, not the best quality in the host, right next to me, though. So if he, if he wakes, we may meet him finally. Well, I mean, I'm still trying to figure out.

how a cocaine totalitarian is actually sleeping. Yeah, well, you know, it, I was also listening to Frank Zappa at the time, cocaine decisions. You know, there's a whole bunch of things when I was sick and I was in the hospital and that camera that was following me everywhere. And that's where I came up with it. Well, that would be a great cat name. Oh, man. to be in that mind.

Sounds scary. Thank you. All right. Here we go. Picking up where we left off last time. All right. These are the fundamental conditions for correctly posing this problem. The genuine givness of genuine evil,

the presence of its correct perception, the power of love and the questioning soul, the strength of will and the soul that investigates and responds, and finally, the practical necessity of its cessation. The problem can be considered posed only if the poser acknowledges that all these conditions are given, and if during the process of inquiry, he affirms them with the power of his attention, not inadvertently losing them or extinguishing them through conscious affirmation or misinterpretation. The absence of even one of these conditions makes the question false, and the answer illusory. Well, the greatness of this book, it lay in the fact that he's just not, he's not using terms and expecting you to understand what he means. That's a humongous problem, especially with, you know, internet debates we had on Facebook and all that stuff I used to have. everything eventually comes down to the definition of terms.

And, of course, we live in a society that's so deeply divided that no one agrees on definition of anything. Or speaks the same language, literally and metaphorically. And so what he's saying here is that we had to go through all of this in order to even begin talking about the issue. You know, we need to know what love is. We need to know what the free will is. We need to know what evil is. We need to know what resistance is.

You need to know what force is. That's not, we can't assume that, especially in an age where they're trying to ban people like us in America by saying that what we say is, in fact, violent. I think I said this before, but was Edgar Steele, poor guy, probably murdered in prison one of our conferences years ago. He said, they're going to ban us by eventually labeling what we say as an act of violence.

The critical race theory is based on it. That's part of its purpose. I was forced to read that stuff in grad school in the 90s. There's nothing new to me. But that's the point. Blacks can't do it. No one else can do it but whites.

Remember in the flagship book there, words that wound, I mentioned it before. Whites are, the word white is doesn't have a capital letter starting it. Blacks always has a capital B. And I thought that was very interesting. So at least I got an inside look into early critical race theory dealing with violence as words.

So this is all very important. And this is really how you lay down an argument. There's no other way to do it. Should I fight evil through physical resistance if there is no evil and what seems to be evil? There can only be one answer. No, I shouldn't. But what is the value of this imaginary answer to a question that abolishes itself? Should I fight evil with physical resistance if I do not see the evil and do not know what it is? What exactly does it consist of? And does it exist at all? And if so, does it exist now and where exactly? there can only be one answer.

Until you see it and find it, you shouldn't. But what value does such a reassuring answer have to the question of a naive or spiritually blind child? You know, he's kind of already covered this section. You have to know what evil is and have had to experience it before you can say, and has to occur right in front of you, you know, or have tremendous evidence for it.

It can't just go off. You know, I think, He's talking more on a personal level than a state level. Because he says, I, in here. You know, you can't just get it third hand and expect to use physical force against it. It's something you have to, you have to see you, something you have to witness. And he kind of said that already, but he's laying it down very clearly here. Should I fight evil with physical violence if the evil acts, act harms nothing,

or harms only what is worthless, unloved, or something that truly deserves, is neither defense nor support and should be treated with indifference, the answer is also clear. No, I shouldn't. Should I fight evil through physical resistance if my will is dead to everything external and right in its numbness? If it has no goals or purposes outside myself and my soul and is not called to anything external, the answer is equally clear. No, I shouldn't.

You know, he's predicting our age in a situation where we do have, not in Google's sense of dead souls. A great book, by the way. But dead souls as in people with dead eyes, people who, people who, and people without standards using the word evil when their agenda is somehow harm. They have no idea what it is. In fact, they are part of it. Um, you know, and again, of course, the obvious statement that evil is only worth fighting if it hurts something that matters. That's, you know, I don't know why they stopped prison riots. That would be a sort of an evil.

That doesn't hurt anything that matters. But I think that's what his general idea is. He's talking about people. And in addition, talking about people just simply who are dead inside, as we say, which is very common these days. Should I fight evil with physical resistance when affection, persuasion, argument, or appeals to shame and conscience or just as effective, or even more so?

The answer is clear. Of course not. The correct formulation of the problem gives a completely different formula for the question. Namely, if I see a stream of genuine criminality and there is no possibility of stopping it by mental and spiritual influence, and I am truly connected by love and, and will, with the beginning of divine good, not only in me, but also outside of me, then should I wash my hands of this, step away, and give the villain freedom to blaspheme and

destroy spiritually? Or should I intervene and stop the villainy, with physical resistance, consciously going to danger, suffering, death, and perhaps even the diminution, diminution and distortion of my personal righteousness. I mean, if we, the simple concept is, what would Tolstoy do? You know, he was very sheltered. You know, he was in the army, it's true. But, you know, what would a normal person do if he walked into a room and a child was being beaten? I don't mean spank.

I mean beaten, fist, bruises, blood, broken jaw, that kind of thing. I think it would almost be instinctual. There's no way to just stand back. Oh, that's their culture. That's just how they are. Some stupid excuse like that. Obviously, we have an obligation. And it doesn't matter if this guy could beat me up or whatever.

It doesn't matter who it is. We have this obligation. And I know that's an extraordinary. extreme example, although these days maybe not so extreme. But, you know, that's that's a basic idea here. If I see a genuine criminality, a stream of genuine criminality, there's no possibility of stopping it by mental or spiritual influence. He can't jump into that room and quote the gospel of Luke to him.

I think it's going to work very much. I'm truly connected by love and will, which even if you don't know the person, and, you know, there's still your people, they're still human, they're still, they know how to feel pain. You're still connected one way or another. The intervention, I think, would be, in my case,

would be instinctual. And it's got me in trouble before. Not something that extreme, but, you know, the abortion, we did the sidewalk, sidewalk counseling, we called it. At,

in Hartwood University of Hartford. And one thing I noticed very interestingly was that almost every, everyone going in there, it was the man dragging the woman. Now this abortionist Who was Jewish, of course Hired a bunch of, I think there were

Mostly homosexuals or You know, black leather jackets The old act up group We're all probably dead now To serve as his Security force for a while And one of them came out and said Help me

As she's being dragged And I instinctually went forward and one of these guys got in front of me, and I hit him. I hit him hard. I know how to punch. And I got in a serious trouble for that. But, you know, it was, when I went forward, it was pure instinct. Even when I hit the guy, it was pure instinct.

You know, I didn't sit down and reason this out in the Socratic method, using dialectics to figure out whether I should act or not. with the one and only time a woman ever did that. And those, you know, abortion was my first issue bringing me into this life. That was my number one issue when I was in high school. And going on,

this is, you know, 1991, maybe. And I was shocked when I saw that almost, almost always, the woman didn't want to be there. She was crying. She wanted to go back in the

I want to go back in the car, she wanted to do anything. But she was the only one. I was right there, I guess. You were not that far from each other. And she said, please help me. Help me or please help me. I move forward instinctively. I mean, I don't know what I was going to do.

The guy got my way. That's what happened. So it's not even a matter of reason in this case. It's a matter of instinct. Here, he's saying that there is a legitimate reason for all this. There's a reason for it. and it makes sense. Chapter 9.

On the morality of flight. This is how the problem of resistance to evil is posed in its most acute, tense, and tragic aspect, resolving the question of the permissibility of physical coercion and suppression. It is clear from the outset that this approach not only differs significantly from the approach put forward by the preachers of non-resistance, but also completely rejects it. For their approach rests entirely on an understanding. insufficient flawed spiritual experience, one that is purely personal, objectively unverified, and philosophically immature. Wow. I almost want to stop right there and let you, but I'll finish

this. They do not objectively and authentically experience what they speak of, naively starting from their own spiritual states and unaware that this is philosophically dangerous and unacceptable. Well, yeah, I understand. You know, when you read Tolstoy, his, there's an arrogance there. I mean, he comes right out and says that I'm the only one who is properly understanding Christ's words. I'm the only one who fully, you know, the churches be damned. I know better. And it was, at least in the, maybe, maybe it's, I read it in the English translation, but

he seems to be very arrogant in that respect but it's a very weak argument now I don't know about Tolstoy's personal experience I don't know his day-to-day life even prior to being a landowner but he was very sheltered he lived in a very healthy society compared to well I guess anything's healthy

compared to 2026 America our world, you know, totally recast this whole issue. And it's just, it's deeply, to say flawed is, you know, to understate the problem. But he was absolutely convinced that he and he alone had the understanding of the gospel. Of course, totally rejected the Old Testament, including the Psalms and everything else, didn't say so. but clearly he rejected the Old Testament, didn't want to even talk about it. He only used a few sentences in the New Testament, which is already, you know that someone's dangerous when they refuse to do that. The Bible is a very substantial compendium of many books that are very different from each other and are, God, many centuries apart.

in their authorship or more so. And this gets me into the Old Testament issue. You know, most of my argument in favor of Christians being able to use violence in certain circumstances. You know, hypothetically speaking, just war theory kind of thing, you know, St. Augustine and Lawrence. There is a, you know, a reliance on the Old Testament there. God isn't telling us to wipe anybody out, but Christ never rejected anything that they did. The very fact that Christ imitated the prophets

who were violent men, I think it's one of the first things he did was, was, you know, kicking out the money changers from the temple. That symbol has so much power. We could talk for years about what it really means. He made a whip for himself. He didn't want to hurt his hand, so he made a whip and started whacking him with it. He hurt them.

I don't know, you know, he doesn't bring that up unless I missed it. He doesn't bring it up, but it's just a very, very weak. His argument is very weak, but he is one of the more extreme pacifist. You walk into a room and a kid is being molested. Tolstoy said you go and you talk to the guy. You tell him how awful this is. You shouldn't be doing them. you know, I'm pretty sure a meth head wouldn't listen to you or something like that.

You know, there's many reasons why someone won't do that, but that the use of violence against him would be incorrect. But of course, he lived in a society that's much healthier than this one. Each person's experience is limited, both in the extent of their given abilities and in the composition of the contents initially accessible to them. And each person has a task of cultivating, purifying, and deepening their abilities in objectively examining increasing and deepening their life's contents neglecting this they condemn themselves to spiritual deterioration and poverty this is a big deal you know it's a big deal to me which is why you paused before um no one really talks about the old testament unless you're talking about the psalms or or maybe the proverb why because

It's long. It's difficult. It's violent. And they have a tough time accepting a lot of that. You know, Moses just by himself, let alone someone like Gideon and the rest of it. Talking about so, you know, that the individual alone is capable of understanding all of this,

just by himself, is absurd. It, you know, you're talking about ancient cultures. you have to understand the basic context of everything. What these terms mean, what these ideas mean. They can come from nothing. And to reject the... You know, what's that one Psalm that's really nasty? I think it's one...

Is it 121? He says, I want his wife to be killed. I want his mother to be killed. I want his father to be killed. I forget it off the top of my head. I don't know what they do with that one. But I have seen New Testament with Justice Psalms in churches before for funerals and things like that.

But even the New Testament, it's not obvious what he means. You know, insults that he uses all the time like dogs, your fathers of the devil. You know, this is, and I won't say it here, but you know that the vile terms that it would translate in English. And he said that all the time. Christ was a difficult man. He was rough. He was tough. And he used his mouth.

He was very harsh with his language. What else could you do? He's dealing with a corrupt class. He's dealing with a corrupt class that was corrupting the Israeli life that already had been long since corrupted. And, well, the prophets didn't do it, so I guess I got to do it. And you know, he's not. wasn't silent when he was whipping them out of the temple.

But even talking about something like Leviticus, the layman can't read that. Even well-educated one. This is why the church exists. Church exists. It was synod. You know, the men who put the Bible together, the St. Athanasius and the St. Kiprian and all those, they also wrote, come and areas on the very books that they included.

And that's where you have to go. And even that's not easy. The church exists to translate this stuff into normal language. But I get, I get viscerally angry. I mean, I just, I can't. When someone says, I picked up the Bible to read it the other day, you know, I went, okay, I got to be cool. You know, I didn't like it. I didn't like it.

I didn't like it. You know, this has happened to me, especially in college. it's not something you can read on the toilet. It's not something that you can read simply just one book out of many. And the Old Testament especially. I don't have to tell you about revelations. The symbols there are so substantial. So that's really what he's getting to here.

And that's what Tolstoy did. He took a few lines, the New Testament, and that's it. and built his theological edifice. And that's what he's condemning here. By demanding this, he undermines his own work and transforms philosophical inquiry and research into a subjective outpouring and teaching into propaganda for his personal way of life

with all its shortcomings and false opinions. No matter how gifted a person may be, he may like the bad and the ugly, he may overlook the profound and indifferent paths by the sacred and divine. His approval does not testify to the worth of what is approved. His censure may be based on purely personal aversions and passions

or on the panicky deviations of his unconscious fears. His conviction may be the product of abstract invention, a tendency towards paradox, mental affectation, unbridled protest or ostentatious stylization. Woe be tied the philosopher if the danger of such teaching escapes him. If religiosity fails to teach him intellectual humility, if he begins to revere his own passions and aversions, then his entire philosophy will prove at best an apt self-description,

a self-portrait of his soul, and is teaching a call to reproduce this portrait in other souls. This is exactly what I'm, he is, he is, he is sending a bullet to Tolstoy here with this. Yes, he's an excellent writer. No one denies that. He's an, he was a very good landowner. you know he had serfs more or less he was very good to them that that's true no one denies that

no one denies that in dealing with him he was a decent man it's also true but you know claiming to know and even if you even if you say that christ removed everything in the old testament as many say well what's the evidence of that christ was very specific of which parts of the Old Testament he removed, like the multiple wives, for example. A couple of other things, but he was very specific in what he removed from the Old Testament. In other words, you know, and especially since he acted like the pray. He quoted it all the time. He quoted the Psalms. He quoted the Old Testament constantly in his own speaking. Christ assumed that his listeners knew this, knew what we call the Old Testament

you know, at least marginally well. But we can't talk like that to the average American because they don't know anything. Their entire world is a sham. Everything that the average American believes is false. They live in a bubble traded by the regime. And it's great to say that, you know, the bubble is popping. And, you know, some people are getting very upset by that.

but, and these are the people who are going to go in and try to read Leviticus, you know, it's a height of arrogance and the height of stupidity. In order to teach, for example, about the relationship between evil and love, it is not enough to imagine what philosophically unsophisticated laymen usually imagine. Evil is not at all what outrages me as love is not at all a pitiful shudder at the sight of another suffering or satisfaction from another success. If a thinker settles for this interpretation, and, moreover, imagines himself the processor of the ultimate truth, that he ensures for himself a tragic comic result in the form

of a pretentious false teaching, and the matter is not at all reduced to an error in a logical definition. The error must be sought not so much in thinking as in spiritual experience. not every person has a genuine experience of genuine evil genuine love religiosity will virtue etc the vast majority of people do not care about acquiring it and and does not know how it is acquired many perhaps could not acquire it even if they wanted to and began to try that's it mean it's like it's like i wrote this um they don't know that they don't know um i talk about this just I've talked about this with you and other topics, you know, questions aren't being

answered. No one even knows those questions were possible. And to believe, as Luther did, that I'm, I'm inspired, and therefore I have a right to impose this on people. And told story was even far more dogmatic. You keep, think of, think of the peasant wars after Luther's Reformation. They saw in the Bible what they wanted to find. That you know, we're all equal. We're all spiritual equal. We're all the same.

Therefore, you can't, we can't, we don't have dues or Corvay or anything else. That's what they got out of it. They got out of it exactly what they wanted to. And it led to the deaths of many thousands. The movement in China after the opium war, I can't think of it off the top of my head. The Taiping rebellion. I think about 10 million people were killed because some guy claimed to be Christ,

or at least his representative. I can't remember. It's been a while since I've gone through it, but because the dynasty failed to fight off the British and the country was dead to opium, the Taiping rebellion came into existence as a way to to restore the truth in China, even though it was Christian,

or kind of semi-Christian. And the guy actually believed that he was inspired. The Holy Spirit, I think he thought he was Christ, the second coming, I think. And just, you know, he reads this stuff, you know, in translations, doesn't listen to the church on the matter.

He reads and gets whatever he, whatever he wants to get out of it. The problem with all the books of the Bible, it's true. Today, a modern man could pretty much find sanction for anything. But that's not the reality. It's just extremely complicated, and that's what we're here for. That's why you have scholars who understand the ancient cultures, what Israel was, what Babylon was, what Egypt was,

what these symbols mean, the context of these symbols. This takes a lot of work. I've always said the mark, there's some great amateurs out there, don't get me wrong. Sometimes they're necessary, especially in medicine. But the mark of an amateur historian is when they read back modern sensibilities into the ancient or medieval world. They use phrases like human rights or something like that. That's their mark. Professional historians do that too, of course.

But that's the mark of someone who shouldn't be studying this stuff. You cannot read our postmodern decayed, dying society and its language and its way of thinking into the book of Leviticus, Deuteronomy. It doesn't, you know, but it's being done every day. What happened after Luther? partisanism became what the Catholics said it was going to become. An insane, just explosion of sex and sectarians.

To this day, continuing to split and split and split and split, everyone claiming to have some conception of the truth. And of course, that's why the church exists. There has to be an authority. There has to be an authority to say yes and no. to these things. Just like, you know, in any other thing, there has to be an authority. It isn't just you.

You know, when he says above, you know, we're limited. All of us are limited. We have all questions. We go to others to get them answered when it comes to. And they bet their soul on this stuff. Read the Bible, however they want. They bet they're betting their soul on their own private interpretation of something. They don't really know anything.

And I've seen this a million times. I've debated with them a million. I get nowhere a million times. And I say, you wouldn't debate your soul on this? So, you know, that's what he's talking about and it's extremely profound. It would be difficult to demand this of every ordinary person. But the teaching philosopher, who is satisfied with his personal everyday ideas, introduces the spiritual boundaries of his personality into the sacred objects he depicts

and consciously or unconsciously attempts to legitimize and canonize his own weaknesses and blindness for humanity. Unfortunately, in Russian philosophical journalism, this method of creating and teaching is all too widespread and even exceptional artistic talent does not always save one from this false and harmful path. I wonder if he's referring to Berdyev there. I've read many times.

an article on him, of course. You know, he kind of created his own personal orthodoxy. Or later on, well, actually, no, not later on. This is 1920. In the 20s, so Vladimir Slovia, another one, created an entire theology. But the 18th century, you know, I'm sorry, the 19th century didn't know World War I or World War II. you know, pretentious false teaching, you know, pretension. I've used that word so many times.

There's no nice way to say it. There's no nice way to correct somebody. No, that is not said in the book of Deuteronomy. It's not said by Solomon. That's not said in the book of Loviticus. Here's what's, you know, this is the issue. This is, you know, and of course I'm limited in this. And they don't care about, you know, they simply don't, it doesn't bother them.

and legitimizing and canonizing their own weaknesses. Yeah, I think either he's talking about either Virdaya or Solovia of there, or maybe both of them. Posing the problem of the permissibility of combating evil through physical resistance requires from the philosopher, first and foremost, the presence of a true spiritual experience in the perception and experience of evil. love and further morality and religiosity.

For this entire problem lies in the fact that a morally noble soul seeks in its love a religiously correct volitional response to the violent onslaught of external evil. To interpret the problem otherwise is to evade it or dismiss it from discussion. Oh, he didn't know the half of it. You know, he died a few decades later, but he didn't see what we have to do. with. I'm sorry, I use incorrect grammar there as lay in the fact. Sorry, I can't speak English. You could tell that I interpreted a lot of this myself, but along with the machine. And, you know, the machine knows better Russian than name. So I'm definitely, this is definitely

correct. Maybe not perfect, but it's definitely correct. But to have a true spiritual experience, well, how do you know which one is true, which one is false? How do you know, without an external authority? An experience of evil.

It's the exact same thing. You have to be able to confront it. We are evil to many people. And love on top of it, or subornos. All these things, to have direct experience with it, not just having read about it in a book somewhere,

which is why the American, the official American scholars like Gary Hamburg, I always pick on him because he's such an idiot at Notre Dame. They fall into these traps all the time. They don't get it, and they know to add another layer of BS to all this, is that they can't say anything that's politically incorrect when you're a major tenured. professor somewhere. If you do, you have to, you know, just forget about it. Put it in the bottom drawer, as it said.

So people have spiritual experiences. Well, how do you know this? How do you know it was spiritual? How do you know it was, you know, something good rather than something evil? I said this to people who claim to have powers, you know, these pagans who think that they can speak with the dead, and all this. I said, how do you know who you're talking to? How do you don't sound a demon pretending to be, assuming that they are getting it from someone else?

How do you know it's not a demon pretending to be some? The demons love to mess with human beings. They love it. They hate us. That's why they do it. And of course, I never get a straight answer. So, anyway, go ahead. Thus, Leo Tolstoy and his followers try first of all to avoid this problem or to gloss over it. Under the guise of solving it, they are constantly trying to show the seeking soul that there is no such problem at all. Because, firstly, there is no such terrible evil, but there are only errors and mistakes, weaknesses, passion, sins and falls, suffering and disasters that are harmless to another spirit.

Secondly, if evil were to be discovered in other people, then one must turn away from it and not turn to it. Do not judge or condemn for it. Then it will be the same as if it did not exist. Thirdly, this problem will not even occur to a loving person. For to love means to pity a person, not to cause him grief and to persuade him to love to love to. And in other respects, not to interfere with him. So that love excludes even the possibility of thinking about physical resistance. Yeah, keep in mind, love is pity.

that he's talking about them. He's not talking about what love actually is. He's talking about the people who believe that a saint always, you know, has to, you know, like this with their head slowly to the side, as meek as could be. So he's talking about his opponents. Go ahead. Fourthly, this problem is empty because a moral person cares about self-improvement and gives other freedom of self-government, turning his will away from them. and seeing in everything that happens, the will of God. And finally, if we are already fighting against external evil,

then there are always other, better, and more appropriate means and measures. This means that the very essence of evil and the attitude toward it, the very essence of love and morality, the will in its direction, the very fundamental nature of religiosity, and even the composition of human relationships and conflicts from beginning to end, are interpreted in such a way that the problem is ignored, or removed from discussion. Its dramatic element is dissolved in sentimental ideology.

Its tragic depth is hushed up. Virtue enjoys its love, while vice unhindered pours its evil will into the world. Yeah, you know, he's talking about Tolstoy and his followers, like the Quakers, and other sex like that, that simply don't believe in evil, and that, you know, there are nothing. more than mistakes or errors.

I've seen this in court shows before where someone has committed a heinous act, and the lawyer said, this was a mistake he made. No, it's not a mistake. You know, throwing away your phone bill, that might be a mistake. Not this, not this pattern of things. You don't believe in evil to begin with. It's simply not going to matter, and it's not going to come out. this notion that Christianity

Christ was this long-haired hippie who wanted to accept them where are they getting this from? But it's extremely common. Yes, he did have many tender moments. There's nothing in the New Testament where he even smiles or laughs. Not one thing.

Never. He was difficult. He was rough on everybody. especially himself. You know, and this, the will of God. Oh, well, it's the will of God. I mean, we can't fight fate. All of that.

So they don't have to do anything. Isn't that nice? They come up with stupid things like the rapture to take any, because, you know, there's no suffering in the rapture. You're just taken, you're just taken up while everyone else suffered. You know, got all these, all these ex-momsters all turned to fundamentalism, evangelical. So it makes sense.

They don't have to really do anything. You notice that a lot of famous people who, rock stars like Alice Cooper, Nicco McBrayne, who I always loved, they come to Christianity as not a Roman Catholic, not as Orthodox, they come to Christianity as evangelical. Because salvation is zero.

You don't have to do anything. You know, you have to confess your sins to God, whatever that means, you know, in your own, in your own words once in a while, that's it. You're saved. The day is over. You know, and as all of this garbage is going on, vice unhindered, pours its evil will into the world. I can't, I can't believe it. You know, the Soloscriptora people, you know, it's very rare that a Protestant has ever read the church fathers.

very rare. The men who put the Bible together believed in the Virgin Mary. You know that, right? And they said the liturgy with the real presence. You knew that too, right? And on and on and on. These are the men who put the Bible together. Usually I get nowhere with that. But this kind of institutionalized ignorance

is what's going on here. And again, as that's going on, vice unhindered pours its evil into the world. especially people who say, oh, it's the will of God, or you can't fight fate. It's the same movie, a law-abiding citizen. That was the slogan that was said many times in that movie. You can't fight fate as he's flashing somebody, which just makes life very easy. I never got this idea of atheists think that, you know, Christianity was invented for our comfort.

That's about the last thing Christianity is for. It's not the last thing. There's nothing comfortable about it if they understood it. but they would have to understand it, but they don't feel like doing. So they're not going to bother doing that. And so they keep on with these silly ideas. Again, while vice unhindered forces evil into the world, evil will into the world. I was going to say they read the church fathers to look for errors so that they can dismiss.

They can dismiss everything that they write. I mean, John Calvin said that St. Ignatius of Antiox, letters are just forgeries. He just dismissed him as forgeries, letters that were taken as not as scripture, but as historical documents for 15 centuries, all of a sudden they're just forgeries. Which was a Jewish idea, too. The connection between the development of Protestantism, post-Luther, and Judaism is very clear. same thing for Islam

that's about as good as they can do and how to hell would Calvin know you know it's it's but you take that idea and you make it writ large and this is a society that we're forced to live in

people who you know have no standards but they're going to condemn us for failing our standard you know we have very high standards we're going to always fall someone without standards has no right to condemn us

but they do. And it's easy that way. So it seems like atheism is created for our comfort. You know, there's nothing comfortable about the religions that we adhere to. But it is comfortable to be a Protestant because you don't have to do anything. Thus, Tolstoy and his associates accept and present their escape from this problem as its solution. It is difficult to find in their writings any judgment on this matter that does not reveal the defects of their spiritual. experience and their desire to evade the question and answer. And if we look more closely at this philosopher's escape from the problem he is resolving, the deep foundations will inevitably be revealed. Here it's enough to touch on the ethical foundations merely to point them out

in order to illuminate its origins. I think maybe we should stop here. And when we go back the next time, we say that these are these are the foundations. here of what he's talking about. He's going to go on for a while. But unless you did, you agree? I agree. That works. Okay. So, you know, I've read in my religion, it's a term of name of the book. My response is to critics, the whole story saying. I read the whole thing many times. And talk about evasion. It doesn't deal with basic issue.

he asked some good questions of himself. This doesn't really answer them. But it's just enough to have his followers, you know, accept it and go beyond it. Remember, Tolstoy based his entire, he can create a church, but in believing that he was the only one. Finally, Christianity's been properly interpreted. And he wrote it in a very dogmatic way. This is what Christ said. This is what he meant.

He was very dogmatic. and how he spoke. And I found that very strange, sometimes even harshly how he listed things. This is what Christ meant. He bases his whole theology on a few lines in the New Testament. He doesn't talk about anything else. But we saw, and we read about his worship of the Jews early on, we know that Tolstoy had a much larger agenda. The Judaizers go back to, you know, or many centuries prior to that. I've written on that ad nauseum as a way to subvert the monarchy.

But in my opinion, of course, he was not a philosopher. He was not a theologian. He was a first-class writer in a literary sense, and that's it. Now all of a sudden, as he gets older, now he says, I and I alone know what, well, not necessarily I alone, but I have led the charge about learning what Christ really said and what it really meant, what he really meant. Everyone else prior before me was absolutely wrong because they were involved in warfare and everything else. So his worship of the Jews, there was a strong Gnostic element to a lot of what he said, people around him. you know, it's shocking how he spoke in such a dogmatic terminology.

You know, he did have a, you know, I mean, I'm not, you know, it's, he's a credit to Russia in when it comes to literature. You know, the red pill issue with women was probably first laid out in Anna Karinana, with Voronski and the, the Hussar. And I have an article on that, talking about, you know, what we want, because you had a sexual revolution amongst the high nobility at the end of the 19th century. Thanks to the Freemasons and other groups like this. The community of wives' idea of early ancient communism. That was pretty incredible.

I don't think, I don't know if he even meant to do it, but he certainly did. And, you know, but, you know, but. Before his death, he spoke in these dogmatic terms. And I don't think the church did any favors by excommunicating him. I think we all know what the stricent effect is. You know what the stricent effect is. Of course, yeah. You know, I think that's what they did.

He was already quite famous, you know, excommunicating him. You know, he wasn't going to commune anyway. He didn't want anything to do with you. It's like excommunicating Lenin. It didn't make any sense at all. But again, I keep repeating that. This crap goes on while evil, unhindered, or it's evil into the world.

And that's really the key here. And these guys will not resist it, don't understand it, never experienced it, or don't want to experience it. Or if they did, they're going to run the other way. And they'll say, it's the will of God that that'll happen. I had no responsibility for it. And we're getting to an age now where this stuff isn't just hypothetical anymore.

The father said that the church at the end times, as tiny as it's going to be, is going to suffer more than anyone else, and he's going to deal with things no one else has dealt with before. They didn't even have a language for it. It's like St. Nylis of Athos. You know, he talked about what the end is going to be. He talked about sexual license and usury and all that stuff. But a lot of the stuff that we deal with, he didn't have, there was no Greek equivalent for it.

Because it was inconceivable back then. I keep saying, take one of these saints and bring them from the fourth century and bring them to American University, see how long. He'll throw himself from a bridge. You're all possessed. I can't take it. you know, and they have to understand that, especially when we're dealing with how we, how we as individuals act. Maybe I'll edit this, maybe I won't.

Who the hell knows? I was just talking with my, with myself muted. So waiting to see if Dr. Johnson gets back in here. If I can add him back, we'll just have to end it with, and edit, edit what he up until that point. So go to the show.

show notes and supports Dr. Johnson's work and everyone take care of themselves. We'll see on the next episode. Take care. Bye. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of on resistance to evil by force by Ivan Eileen. Dr. Johnson. What's happening today? I can't wait to bring the kitten into, he has his first appointment tomorrow with the vet. And they say, is cocaine totalitarian here? My wife wouldn't do it, so I had to make the appointment. It's my vet. I've known her for a long time. And they misspelled the name already.

So, you know, it's something I'm looking forward to. It's little things that keep me going. Yeah, sometimes making people just a little bit uncomfortable in public keeps them on their toes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's a long story. they're going to get crazier as the years go on too he's got a persistent cough the cough won't go away

it's very intermittent but it's it's been two weeks now and you have a cough that won't go away I'm bringing in there's no other symptoms he's fine but I'm a little paranoid now so I'm gonna bring him in tomorrow really I just want to hear them say that in the waiting room

to be honest see if they even pronounce it right they're going to try and shorten it to C.T. And you're going to be like, oh, I'm sorry. What was that? What's the name again? I don't know what C.T. is. Yeah.

We call him Koki. But that's what my wife is good. If she made the appointment, that's what she was going to say. I said, no, that's not his name. He's name. So I'll call them. Cocaine's a totalitarian. I'm figuring out, okay, someone's going to ask me, what the hell is the background here for this name?

All right, let's get going. Ready? All right. Yes, sir. Pick it up where we left off last time. At the center of all of Tolstoy's philosophical quest stands the question of man's moral perfection. Everything else depends on the resolution of this question and is determined by it. It is in the answer to this question that the original fear of death is drowned.

It was precisely the experience of moral perfection that revealed to him both the meaning of his whole life and the possibility of filling the desolation of the modern soul, which had initially horrified him. Strictly speaking, Tolstoy's entire worldview was nurtured by him from a moral experience that rose above everything, judged and condemned everything, replaced and displaced everything, religious experience, the thirst for knowledge, the power of artistic and self-righteous vision, legal consciousness, and love for the homeland. Morality became the highest, self-sufficient, and sole value before which everything else was devalued. His entire teaching is nothing other than morality, and in this lies and by this determines everything that follows. This is a critique in the true sense. It's both positive and negative. I've been reading told story for a long time.

Somehow he got the impression that because he's a big writer, he can now start thinking and writing about, you know, theology and political science. But when you're reading Tolstoy, outside of this question, you find yourself agreeing with him quite a bit. You know, especially when he talks about the modern state, he's not talking about the Russian state. you know, all of that. You know, he's, he's, he talks about capitalism.

I mean, he's not, he's not wrong about a lot of things. He's very naive about a lot of things. But ultimately, morality came, well, that's the expense of everything else, including spirituality. We know who his God was. His God was the Jews. His God was, you know, Christian teaching, as we said before, came down. to five or six lines in the Old Testament, easily understood,

easily repeated, easily remembered, lines from the, sorry, the New Testament. But that's no way to interpret anything. He found what he wanted to find. But he was driven,

indeed, by a moral concern. I mean, modernism had already, he slaughtered, God knows how many millions in wars at this point. And this is before, you know, a told story wasn't around for World War I. And God knows what he would have said at that point. But, you know, he didn't trust the modern world.

He didn't trust the scientific establishment in any country. He was no materialist, but he was a moralist of his own making. He, you know, he was a little bit like Rousseau. And sometimes when I want a good, solid anti-modernist critique, I go to him. Don't accept everything. But he has some very good criticisms of what we call the modern world. So that's why he's here. He's half positive, half negative.

Tolstoy's morality is a philosophical teaching as two sources. Firstly, a living feeling of compassionate sympathy, which he calls love and conscience, and secondly, the doctrinaer understanding, which he calls reason. These two forces appear in his view separately and self-sufficient, without entering into any higher correcting or deepening combinations, and by no means merging with each other. Compassion supplies his teaching with immediate material. Understanding formally theorizes and develops this material into a worldview doctrine. Any other material is rejected as imaginary and false.

Wherever it originates, any deviation from the rational deductive sequence is dismissed as a dishonest trick or sophism. His entire worldview can be reduced to this thesis. Quote, one must love pity, accustomed oneself to this, abstain and labor for this, find bliss in this, and reject everything else, end quote. Tolstoy's entire teaching is the rational development of this thesis. Well, what I was trying to say in that particular translation is that it's not loving pity, but that he defines love as pity. And which, of course, is far from, you know, the fullness of that term. You know, any false for worth anything suffers with this word love. it's used every day, sometimes in the stupidest ways,

to the point where, like so many, it has no meaning whatsoever. But there is a philosophical conception that you see even in the church fathers. And there it actually gets defined, believe it or not. So, but he's not wrong here. The living feeling of compassionate sympathy, that's what he means. That's what he means by love. And then that very typical doctrinal understanding, and he's absolutely right, he speaks as if he is a, you know, the counsel of Trent, which is extremely irritating in his theological works. It's almost like he's convincing himself of things.

And they are separate, and there is no connective tissue there. there's a little bit. I mean, here he kind of contradicts himself a little bit later as his material creates a worldview. There are really two separate things for him. But the line, any deviation from the irrational deductive sequence is dismissed as dishonesty. We talked already about Tolstoy's dealing with his critics.

And his, my religion has a whole section on responding to my critics on the question of resisting evil by force. And he doesn't really get to the issue. He does a lot of deflecting. And I know I mentioned it before in more detail, but sometimes he has a tough thing. He didn't have a philosophical mind. He had a literary mind.

And when he wrote philosophical works, and God knows theological works, he went off the rails. but his but he's absolutely right in terms of the he had two tracks, two mentalities that generally speaking didn't meet. But you can picture Tolstoy thinking that, you know, okay, I'm a theologian, I know what Christ meant in the New Testament, there can be no violence against evil.

And that derives from our love from our fellow man. I mean, I could picture that. So they do connect at some point. But there certainly is no third thing that unifies them. He's not, you know, being Hegelian, of course, Eileen knows that, knows you have to have a third thing. Being a Hegelian, especially, and he knows that, being a philosopher. On Tulsa, I didn't know that. So they kind of just float together in his writing.

So, but we'll get in more detail here in a little bit. it is precisely the form of rational morality that imparts to his teaching the trait of a divided self-perception, constantly mindful of one's sin and opposing oneself to one's evil lust. The moralist is always internally divided. He is terrified of his own sinfulness, looks back at it suspiciously, pedantically watches it, intimidates it, and remains intimidated by it, always ready to compel himself and incapable of a single, powerful heroic impulse, but precisely such integrity and such impulse are necessary for the external suppression of evil. Furthermore, the form of rational morality gives his teaching the features of an all-equalizing severity,

recognizing only the full unattainable ideal, only one criterion in a straight line at that with no deviations. if you go to if you go to any anarchist library or a big name anarchist page they have Tolstoy but you know they're ify about him

um riffy about him because he was a landowner he had he had employees and all that but because he was so concerned with his own sin they have no conception of sin um but more importantly so he didn't he didn't really fit there

he was certainly an anarchist he was a sort of a semi-nostic Christian and you know focused on the Jews apparently as you know they can resist evil by force now I get that impression distinctly from what we wrote what we read weeks ago

whenever that was there doesn't seem to be a problem there but the concept of sin in the Christian sense anarchists aren't really that interested in. So they list him on pages. They like some of this stuff. He's not front page news.

But that's, you know, that's the big issue. So he can't make the connection. And this is what Eileen is really driving at here. The whole story is spending a lot of time suppressing drives and passions in himself, lust of all kinds. and yet he can't see the state has to do that with groups of people who represent those same passion.

He can't make that connection. It's not the same thing to him. He really doesn't have the philosophical acumen to connect that anyway. He is constantly at war with himself. There's another thing that anarchists hate about. He's constantly at war with himself. He was a neurotic man, but sometimes for good reason. he saw the modern world as unleashing passions and lust that should never have been unleashed. And that's a good part of Tolstoy.

That's a part of Tolstoy that the left doesn't really want to deal with very often. And of course, anarchists tend to be pretty violent. And having, I don't care how many lines in the New Testament that Tolstoy, they don't want the New Testament there at all. So still, they treat him like an elder statesman that we can occasionally make, reference to. And that's about it. But the war he made, and legitimately, I mean, he was very concerned with his own sin. He made war on himself concerning those sins. He couldn't connect that with anyone else or any other body, including the state, making war on the sins of the body politic. For reason, everything is clear and simple. It does not see the complexity of inner and

outer life. It knows no tragic contradictions. Its job is to simplify complexity to clarity and reduce clarity to systematic unity. It is blind to reality and deals only with abstract concepts. In morality, it will provide a single criterion, a scheme, a template, a cliche, and discard that which does not submit to it. It is a rigorous, drawn to universally affirmative and universally negative judgments. Everything is either X or not X. Every X is approved, every not X is condemned, and everything else provokes its wrath as an invention of self-interest and bad faith. Hence, the inability of the minds to discern the complexity and depth of life's situations and relationships. Hence, its inability to resolve questions of life's purposefulness, which for it become

questions of moral fidelity. But it is precisely this vision of the complexity and purposefulness of life's relationships that is necessary for physical resistance to evil. Well, you could see the Hagle coming out in Ilin here, especially in the first part. There's nothing simple about reason. There's nothing simple about abstract concepts. Clearly, they have to be connected to the people you're talking about. You know, political theory is one thing. You know, my two fields in grad school were political philosophy and comparative politics.

They go together. You can't have political theory floating in the air, you know, a Contagant scheme, for example. No, it has to connect to a group of people who are actually living it and functioning this way. And that's where Russia came from. Russia and Ukraine came from. And those two things went together very, very well in a way that really no one else was talking about. But he also not, I mean, he's not talking about reason as such. he's talking about Tolstoy's conception of reason.

We all know from Hegel that either extranotic, he knows that that's not true. He's talking about and negatively talking about Tolstoring as taking a very simple conception of reason.

Not the true Higelian sense, which actually is extremely complex, conceptually or otherwise. But for Tolstoy, you know, when you read his works on political theory, you know, sometimes he's right, sometimes he's wrong, but it is quite simple. You could blow through it.

And I don't know, I think he was at that point in his life, he was too sheltered. He lived in a fairly healthy society. He wasn't threatened by war or anything else. And I know I've said this before. I keep harping on it, but I think it matters. So I like the fact that Ilin is bringing out certain positive aspects of, of Tolstoy. He says it's just, you know,

he's not just dumping on him. Tolstoy hated the modern world. And one of the things he hates about the modern world is the fact that it's created so many different ways to slaughter people. And little did he know what was going to happen later. So, but his concept of reason is sort of like the positivist of the empiricist, the empiricist.

X equals X, which every Higelian knows is not true. Furthermore, the form of rational morality imparts to Tolstoy's teaching a peculiar egocentrism and subjectivism. Intimidated by his sinful desires and the need to subject them to the judgment of a single direct criterion, the moralist begins to experience the evil of his soul as the true, main, and only evil, and his internal moral struggle as a central event of the world. Morality always teaches not about good and evil, but about personal goodness and personal depravity. It is occupied with the atom, the human individual, and the scope of its attention is

limited. The moralist is usually averted from everything except the immediate state of the personal soul. This is explained by the fact that morality, although generally necessary, is a primary lower stage of the ascent to moral perfection. Again, he's not talking about what he believes morality is. He's talking about what Tolstoy thinks. Morality is. And the basic thrust here is very simple, that Tolstoy's concern with his own sinfulness was so overwhelming at times that he couldn't even see any other body, any other institution, any other person for that matter. You know, the immediate state of the personal soul. And that might be positive in, you know, I mean, so many of us have suffered with sins and passions and struggles. We know what he's talking about here.

And the church fathers talk about it all the time. They were brilliant psychologists. So it got to the point where, again, you've got to be a little neurotic here, but I think Tolstoy was extremely neurotic. And that he got to a point where he just simply couldn't see or comprehend anyone else. So obsessed was he with his own moral failings. It's almost as if his writings were a way to almost like a therapy. a form of therapy to deal with his own, with his own sin.

I wouldn't know anything about that, of course, you know. At this stage, the initial instinctive attitude of self-love, inherent in the self-preserving individual, has not yet been overcome. The direction and intention of personal will and attention has already been renewed and has entered the spiritual stage. For man, seeks some objectively meaningful perfection, but the objective scope of attention is,

delimited by the boundaries of the personality and the previous instinctive egoism has given way to moral egocentrism. The moralist is a man withdrawn and focused on his own states and experiences, his inclinations, and merits. For him, it is more important and valuable to refrain from some evil deed than to contribute to a whole life-giving stream to social, ecclesiastical, national, or community, life. This concentration on his own, internal, and precisely from a moral point of view, is often so strong in him that he actually believes in the reality of his personal mood and does not really believe in the reality of other people's mental states and external actions. He says, quote,

Life is only what I am conscious of and myself. Man's true knowledge ends with the knowledge of his personality, his animal nature. The animal nature, man knows quite especially from the knowledge of everything that is not his personality. Man does not know everything that is outside this self, but can only observe and determine an external conventional way. About other people, man has some external idea, but does not know them. We fully know only for our, only our life, our striving for good, and the reason that points us to this good. Yeah, I translated that myself. I know it's a little rough.

there are actually parts in his writings where he just comes out and says that. Now, the implication here is that reason is completely clear. And it's not. Apparently, he doesn't believe in the subconscious. I mean, the concept really wasn't around. Although, again, the church fathers had a,

they didn't call it that, but they had a conception of it. making even the self a difficult thing to contend with. The nature of man's drives go way back. We don't know where they start, personally or collectively. Because we have to deal with the subconscious. I mean, you really can't deal with the subconsciousness.

You know, Hegel's whole thing was to bring that that was the subconscious to consciousness. That's what the development of a rational person is. And also clearly rejects any kind of ethnicity because one of the central core ideas of nationalism is that you see yourself and others. You've been through the same things. Let's say, you know, foreign occupation or famine or something like that. You've suffered, even if you don't know them, you've suffered together. You see this like with fans of the same band.

You know, they see each other on the street, you know, hardly right. You see that. But, you know, this is, you know, the highest level, which is the national level. That makes any sense. You've been through the same kind of things. So, but to take from what he said that we only fully know our life or striving for. That's an extremely arrogant thing to say because it suggests that he knows himself perfectly. And again, later on, psychology would, you know, tear that concept.

the part, I think he was aware of the fact that the word fully should not be used here. Somehow he is incapable of bad faith. He is incapable of rationalizing, which is something that humans do all of the time, special pleading, all that stuff, everything that we do, all that's going to be removed at the judgment in front of God. But now, We use it as some kind of an escape. We can rationalize anything. It's almost frightening. He, however, is not susceptible to that.

And again, the typical arrogance of him dealing with either psychological or theological things is evident. Constantly sorting out his soul and pedantically striving for correct knowledge of it, he does not learn to correctly perceive other people's moods and gets used to considering other people's souls a dark, unknown, imperceptible sphere about which neither he nor anyone else, quote, has the right to judge, end quote. The work of internal self-improvement necessary for every person gradually acquires an overwhelming exceptional significance in his life, sometimes reaching the point of moral suspicion. He becomes a prisoner, a slave to his own virtue, and if he, at the same time, and if he,

at the same time, dismisses all other spiritual dimensions and constructive paths, and his life takes on a shade, takes on a shade of self-emptying pedantry. I'm not so sure Tolstoy was aware of this. I think he would deny it if you were to confront him with this. But logically speaking, that's where his point of view would go. ultimately it is absurdly egocentric you know it's like saying i'm i'm so humble i'm more humble than all you people you know and what a contradiction that is you know don't even you know don't even you know don't become close to me on bragging about your humility that's that's an example of what he of what he means here um but what he forgets of course and and what what he he's being challenged here is that he is part of a larger society.

That's where his language comes from. That's where his, that's what he was raised. That's, you know, the upbringing, his basic moral goods. That's where it comes from. And at the time in Russia, it was quite unified, especially where he was from. And, but he forgot all about that or rejected all of that. you need that for development. Aristotle was very clear,

there's no such thing as this, you know, the idiotists, those who are either so brilliant that don't need society or so stupid that they can't be in society. So they live outside of it. No, normal people need society. We are dependent in almost every way.

And in terms of virtue, absolutely. Sometimes we need to hear from others that we're doing something wrong. We don't like it. but sometimes they're right. Again, he seemed to suggest that he's above that, that he doesn't need that. It's understandable that such a person

naturally calls for moral self-improvement and sees it as a spiritual penicia, while it's unnatural to educate others in combat socially objectified evil. At a time of familial, national, and universal catastrophe caused by the victorious explosion of evil, they will continue to cautiously reflect

on their own inner moral infallibility and righteousness and invite others to the same non-resistance, reminiscent of those who, during the plague, allowed the concedents to spread and cared only about their own personal immunity. These are the people who say that the church shouldn't be political. They refuse to define that term. I certainly agree if you define politics as campaigns, elections, and voting, yeah, that might be a problem. Cyprus accepted.

But if you define it as matters of justice, totally different story. He's saying both of them. And that's a classic example. You see it all the time in fairly liberal, at least in my case, fairly liberal orthodox groups, oh, we don't talk about that here.

You don't deal with that here. Well, except for Jewish stuff, but, you know, we don't talk about that here. You don't want the church to be political. We don't want anyone being divided. We don't want that kind of fighting that may divide the parish or whatever it might be. And we just function, we just look at ourselves. And what you're saying here, of course, is that it's very unhealthy, especially at a time of universal evil.

You know, Ilin, of course, he's talking about the takeover of the Soviets. But God, if you were alive today, you know, he said, oh my God, the Soviets took over the whole world. So, you know, that mentality took over the whole world. So even more so, we can't just be, we do have to focus on our inner morality. That's extremely important. Remember, the word hypocrisy, and I say this all the time, doesn't mean you're inconsistent. Everybody's inconsistent. What hypocrisy means is that you don't believe the things that you're preaching.

You don't believe the moral goals that you claim to be pursuing. Like a politician, you know, he says one, you know, different things, different people. It's not a matter of simple inconsistency. And I hate the idea. I've said this before. Those with no standards condemning us for failing to achieve our very high standard. So the two things go together very well. The whole point of Pladeless Republic was to show that the soul is manifest in the state, just writ large.

And as a 17-year-old or 18-year-old reading this for the first time, I was blown away. I had never heard anything like this before. I never heard or read any proofs of the spiritual life before and how it's absurd not to believe in the spiritual. world. I couldn't believe it. And think, you know, Plato's a very good writer. So I was, you know, precocious and I read very quickly, but I got the gist of it and I was totally blown away by it. Part of the reason why I'm doing what I'm doing today. I was going to save this for the end, but this whole thing that we're talking about here, this phenomena is it's present in every church now, you'll find it pretty much in every denomination and everywhere, including orthodoxy

and Catholicism. But it's no bigger than what they call, what they term big evangelicalism. If you talk about, you know, what Francisco Franco had to do, or you talk about any kind of using politics to stop evil in society, these people will condemn you as heretics and say or outside of the faith, all the while, if you logically and consistently say, well, we need to apply this to Israel too. They're killing 80% of the people they kill probably more innocence. They will call you a fascist and a Nazi. Because basically, we're not allowed to do that, but Jews get a pass.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Yeah, thank God. Russians have a certain immunity to that, but other Orthodox denominations do not. Not denominations, but ethnic Greeks, New Calendar Greeks, etc. But I love how you mentioned Francisco Franco. What would have happened had he not taken action? What would have happened had he not invaded Spain from his base in North Africa? what would have happened to the church Christianity would have disappeared. I had a, when I was an undergraduate, you know, 18, 19 years old, I had a big picture of Franco in my dorm room.

And I had to explain that to people, you know, visiting. And one of the reasons he's a great man is that he used quite, you know, measured violence, as measured as he could possibly do for victory. against people that he knew would destroy the church, Christianity in general, wherever they went. So if I don't take action, I'm responsible for the destruction of the church. They were killing nuns. They were killing priests. We all know that. That's why Francisco Franco was a great man.

All the money that the West was pouring into the Republican state. One of the few good things Mussolini did was, you know, assist Franco materially. to counter that. And it was extremely, you know, that's a tremendous example. And I think about him on a regular basis. I think you know that already. But you just think what would have happened to the church in Spain without Franco or someone like Franco. Not only the church in Spain, that would have given the Soviet Union a stronghold on the Mediterranean and in Southern Europe. and when World War II came along, they basically,

it would have given them a better chance to win, which they did, thanks to the help of Judeo-America and Judeo-England, but also they probably would have gotten all of Europe. The implications of Franco not existing are extraordinary. I think some of our listeners know that, but I think if we thought about it, we could, you know, stretch that out. the implications would be tremendous for world history.

Moving on. Finally, this entire formulation of the question leads to the fact that in Tolstoy's teaching, the moral correctness of one state of mind emerges as the highest self-sufficient goal, the primary and only worthy focus of human endeavor and aspiration. If for a religious person, morality is a condition or stage leading to the vision of God and the assimilation of God, if for a scientist, morality is the existential minimum of true knowledge. If for a political patriot, morality signifies the quality of a soul matured for sovereign service, then here, morality is the ultimate value in

itself, serving nothing higher. He who has attained that has attained something ultimate and unconditional, that which constitutes the meaning of human life and which cannot be sacrificed, for it is above all, and there is nothing higher. Everything is subordinated to morality. Everything is judged by its criteria. It is the end of everything, and for it, everything is a means. Everything can and should be given for her and for her sake, but to sacrifice her, even partially, even momentarily, is senseless, unnatural, blasphemous. Having attained his treasure, the stingy knight owns worlds and cannot give it up for anything else until he ceases to be a stingy night.

You notice that I use the surrealic word for, you know, moral. And it's just moral, you know, for us. It's a loan word because there is no conception of that kind of morality in the East. There's many other words. But the kind of morality that, you know, in and of itself, Manuel Kant, again, comes to mind. that this goal is self-sufficient. Now, but anyone who talks about morality in this way,

they're talking about a universal, they're talking about a universal object, and therefore they have to explain where it comes from, where it was created, how do we know anything about it? And so you have to be led to God. There's no way out. Sometimes I do wonder If Tolstory messed around with atheism

I'm not 100% sure I think I think maybe on occasion I don't think he fell on that But I think on occasion he did For this very reason He did believe in free will You can't believe in free will and be an atheist That doesn't make any sense

Because free will implies a spirit Something that isn't matter something that isn't subject to cause and effect, well, you have to explain where the spirit comes from, or the soul, you know, what do you want to call it? Mind versus brain. And again, that will lead you to God.

You know, did evolution create a spirit? You know, so, you know, this is almost a, and I think, I'm sure there are atheists out there that have this conception of, you know, we have a moral goal, and that is absolutely it. We don't need anything else. We don't need any conception of God or even, even the state. And as we've seen before, this morality is a personal achievement only. Last paragraph, and I think we should end right there. Yep.

This is precisely why a moralist of this kind, if he is consistent, will inevitably be doomed to monstrous situations in life. For indeed, that will that will he answer to himself, to God if, present at the rape of a child by a brutal mob and armed with weapons, he chooses to persuade the savages. Appealing to the obvious and to love, and then, allowing the crime to be committed, remains conscience of his own moral impeccability. Or will he allow an exception here? But in the name of what? In the name of what will he sacrifice his righteousness and commit evil by resisting it with violence? If this higher reality is accessible to him and recognized by him, then it must be formulated. And if it is formulated, then what will remain to the entire notorious doctrine of non-resistance? And that is not something that Tolstoy ever did.

Now, I know he uses an extreme example here, the rape of the child. But it's extreme, it gets people's attention, and it does illustrate the issue. Now, if it is a brutal mob and you're by yourself, well, persuasion is going to do anything. but you might not be able to do anything either. You may actually have to go in and just sacrifice yourself. Because you could never just walk away unless you have something else going on. You may just have to, you know, get beaten up or get pushed out of the way or something like that. At least you can hold your head high afterwards.

But he has no, you know, he never, Tulsaulay never talks about. about it. You know, you didn't have, you know, child trafficking in old Russia by any means. You'd have anything like this back then. But, again, that's the conception of the modern and out of the postmodern world. You know, walking away in the name of what?

You know, what moral system is so monstrous that you would walk away? What does it say is one person? We've mentioned this before. Let's say it's one person. And you go in there and he's, you're going to do this horrible thing, and you sit there and you open your Bible and you start reasoning with it. Oh, look, it says right here, and Matthew, you probably shouldn't be doing this.

You know, what's going to happen? It's not going to work. You're going to have to use every concept, whatever you have around physically to get rid of them. You smash them in the head. You use a lamp. You use whatever it takes. Only then can you at least, I mean, you'll probably traumatized forever by seeing that, but at least you could be, you could hold your head high.

And America would get arrested for it, but still, the prisoners would be nice to you. You know, how they are with rapists now. Anti-rappists are pretty, you get killed every day. But say, no, no, I have to worry about my own moral impeccability, so I'm going to walk away and let this happen. He's showing the absurdity of Tolstoy's doctrine. And that Tolstoy doesn't deal with this question, has never had to deal with this question at all in his intellectually or, you know, in his life. What would he do?

What would Tolstoy do in this very extreme situation? He walks in back into his house. He sees that happening. I guarantee you just instinctively he's going to grab whatever, whatever's around and beat the guy. And then, oh, no, what happens to my non-resistance now falls apart. All righty. We'll leave it right there. Pick it up next time.

Chapter 10 on sensimentality and pleasure. I will encourage everyone, as I always do, go over to the show notes, go over to the description on the video, donate to Dr. Johnson's work by his new book on Ukraine and Russia, and, yeah, show him that you appreciate what he's doing here. Believe me, this is a lot harder for him. It's easier for me because I'm not. pronouncing Russian names and doing a lot. This is a lot harder.

Oh, yeah, thank God. This is a lot harder for Dr. Johnson because not only are we dealing with spiritual matters here, but he's also translating this. So, yeah, please show him that you love him and go donate to him. Yeah. You know, I'm using a machine translation, but often in these cases, it's not very good. So I have to go in and do it myself, different pieces. And, you know, it's Google Translate and the index.

They've gotten so much better. I remember when they first came out, how awful it was. But still, stuff like this, you can't trust it. And it makes some absurd statements that you know can't, you know, aren't original. So I just, and there's certain parts you could tell I've had to do myself. And thank God, I think it reads a lot better than the Schulzhenitin book. That was purely, I think, a machine translation back then. as far as I know, it certainly reads like one, an older one.

And yeah, you're not having to do that. Read all these names, sometimes long lists of names. That's mercy from God. But, you know what? This is a labor of love. This is what I do. This is my life. This is my vocation.

So there's no problem there whatsoever. And I appreciate the generosity of your listeners. Again. All right. So I'll see in a couple days. Thank you, Dr. Johnson. All right, man. See you.

I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of on resistance to evil by force by Yvonne Ivan Eileen. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today? Now, listen. I have like four cats in here right now. There's a good chance you're going to meet cocaine totalitarian.

He's been running around all over the place. I tried to get him, but he ran. He has so many other things to do around here. And Chbapurdy as well is wandering around here too. And his sister, oh, still back there. Susie Cream Cheese is right behind me. That's Cocaine Totalitarian's actualitarian's actual older sister. So, um.

So I can promise nothing here in terms of chaos later on. Also, we did have a slight power out a few hours ago, so I give you no guarantees in that regard. Fair enough. One of these days, you'll get a generator like me. Well, we have one. We have a kerosene one. Oh, okay. Cool.

I'll figure out of working. All righty. It looks like we might have a little bit of a delay. Hopefully that'll clear up. But I'm going to get going if you're ready. I'm ready. I'm always ready. All righty. Chapter 10 on the sentimentality and pleasure.

Even deeper and more defining links connect the doctrine of non-resistance with the substantive roots of the entire teaching. For the idea of love, nurtured and advanced by Tolstoy, introduces a content into all his fundamental tenets and conclusions that predetermines the incorrectness of almost all his questions and answers. The love extolled by his teaching is, at its core, a feeling of compassionate sympathy, which may be directed toward a specific being, but can also capture the soul without regard, plunging it into a state of generalized tenderness and softness. It is precisely this feeling, taking root in the soul, capturing its deepest senses and determining the direction and rhythm of its life that brings with it a whole series of dangers and temptations.

Someone pulling out the wire. I won't say who. You know, there were Tostoyans, people who followed him, who created their own communities in the U.S. and, you know, mostly the U.S., parts of Western Europe, where the Soviets would hear nothing about that. And it's one thing if everyone agrees that everyone's dedicated to the same concept, but they all fail.

Every one of them has failed. I don't know if I said this before, but my master thesis advisor was Limon Tower Sergeant, the head of the world leader of utopian political theory. And he tried to look like, Leo Tolstoy. I'm not the biggest fan of mine ever. But, and he was very, very, you know, he was the expert, too, in these intended communities. Mostly in the U.S., under various ideological guises.

But Tolstoy was the dominant one for a long time. But when everyone in your society agrees, that's okay. but your society, you know, it only goes so far because there's people outside of your society. And I have the feeling that's why most of these things have failed miserably. But there's been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them attempting to recreate this. The Tosoyan idea on American soil in the middle of nowhere. You know, the homage did their own thing.

That's a separate whole separate. separate issue, which I live very close to them here. They do not believe in nonviolence. I am telling you that right now. But I have the feeling it was two things that rip them apart. Internal affairs in terms of money and things like that. And what do you do with the outside of society? You have to leave the community once in a one. But me, a century ago, two centuries ago.

I'm sorry, two years. What am I saying? A century ago. You know, there's still a lot of them now. I don't know if they're Tolstoyan or not, but they're still in the hippie commune, stuff like that we had. I think most of those are gone. Most of the attempts to recreate Tolstoy, even at a local level, have been failure.

So what he's saying here is something that we've been, we're familiar with. Compassionate sympathy doesn't necessarily have to be directed towards a person or a being of any kind. It's this generalized concept. And that's where we have a problem. So you end up being this generalized tenderness and softness. If that takes root in the soul, that starts a whole series of dangerous and temptations. And let me say, I'm finishing some of the translations on the next five chapters here.

and he gets into Tolstoy's theory in greater depth. You see some payoff here in the next five chapters in ways that I was not expecting, exactly. Tolstoy was so extreme. Let me give you one example. And we're going to hear this again, but let me give you one example how extreme Tolstoy was. He says if you see somebody with a knife,

he's going to plunge it into a person who you assume is innocent. Well, first of all, you don't know, you don't know what the intentions of the person with the knife are. But if you shoot him, you know he's going to die. You don't know that the guy on the ground is going to die. But you know that when you shoot the guy, he is going to die. Maybe he's just raising it. Maybe he's just, you know, trying to be tough about him.

So you don't know. You don't know what he's going to do. so you can't shoot him. And there's many other examples we'll get into in the next five chapters, but he just goes to such an extreme level that it simply can't be done in an intentional community. So, first of all, this feeling in itself gives the soul such pleasure about the fullness and possible acuteness of that which only those who have experienced it know. to experience it is a blessing not only in the sense that it is morally valuable and that it should be experienced,

but also in the sense that it in itself gives the soul the greatest satisfaction, delighting it and saturating it with this sweetness. In this state, the soul experiences itself as blissfully united, completely embraced and dissolved. Everything in it seems to flow and stream, resound and shine, sing and sparkle. It finds within itself a source of happiness that needs nothing else, and, moreover, a source that cannot be taken from it by the arbitrary will of another, and in comparison with which other sources seem meager, weak, and unreliable. Sounds great, doesn't it? We keep reading. It is precisely this immediate accessibility of the key to pleasure, its self-sufficient nature, the intensity of the satisfaction it provides, and especially the ability to, to play and sing it in an aimless emotion that can imperceptibly accustom of the soul to spiritually

unjustified and spiritually insignificant self-indulgence to a concentration on this self-indulgence and on its acquisition. This good can bind the soul to itself not by the power of its spiritual superiority and perfection, but by the power of its delightful bliss. And further, precisely to this extent, it can lead to a cooling and instinctive aversion to everything that is not this good, that is not this good, or that does not lead to it. This can give rise to the practice and theory of moral hedonism, which distorts both the force of evidence and the worldview and the foundations of personal character. Such a feeling, if people have experienced it in that way that he described it in the previous

chapter, it comes from the devil. This does not come from God. It is not this generalized thing that makes no distinctions. And I think many followers of Tolstoy have felt that. You know, this aimless emotion, as he calls it. But you see where it leads to. Automatically, you start, it's self-indulgent. And you're promoting it not because it's superior spiritually,

but because of how happy it's going to make. And then you start developing contempt for people outside of your circle. So it doesn't take long for problems to start happening. And again, in the next five chapters, he's going to take this and tear it apart, putting Tolstoy's point of view in the most charitable way he can and then demolishing it, which is the right way to do it. But you have to put, you have to know your enemy's point of view better than your enemy did or does in order to properly reject it. Having gone to grad school, I can say that.

I could put their point of view usually better than they can, which is why people like me are a little dangerous. They don't know our point of view. They've never come across it in an academic way. it's all caricature, you know. But there has to be a reason why the intentional, they're called intentional communities like the hippie commune, whenever it is, have all failed. There's got to be a reason or a set of reason.

And that by itself, that's not what he's saying here, but it generally suggests that this isn't something that anyone could do. But even if it succeeds, you start seeing problems. And it's very success. Nothing like this would come out of anything directly coming from God. The moral hedonist is drawn to anything that evokes a state of blissful tenderness in him and recoils from anything that threatens to disrupt, interrupt, or extinguish this state. His spiritual eye begins to search and quickly turns away or closes its gaze as soon as anything

disturbing or disgusting appears within its field of vision. Irritation, bitterness, and malice are burdensome both in himself, as feelings opposed to the pursued bliss and in others as they undermine his own blissful balance and well-being. Therefore, as if out of an instinct for self-preservation, he learns to turn away from evil and devote himself to his inner well-being. Well, you could turn away from it all you want. It doesn't mean it goes away. It ends up being a very selfish concept. You know, and Tolstoy was in a position to believe that and to think that. Most people aren't. We live in a very unhealthy society.

It is simply impossible today. It's a miracle that I haven't come across, you know, a violent crime where I would have to intervene. God forbid a rape or something like that. But that's a miracle. I mean, plenty of people have. And they have to make a decision. But these people, of course, wouldn't, much be you know they're repulsed by it but only because it it interrupts the high that they have

this false um uh sense of self that they've developed um and that's really the only reason because it makes them happy because it makes them feel like the oh god this must be from god right and that's why he then turns evil is not you know evil exist, but because it harms my, the high that I feel, I can't deal with it at all. Gradually, his spiritual eye adapts and learns to overlook that which is truly disgusting. The painful, tormenting, soul-destroying experience of genuine evil is completely removed and dismissed by him. He does not want this experience, does not allow it to take place in his soul, and as a result, he gradually begins to not believe in evil and its possibility at

all. Having realized this method of his, he formulates it as a rule recommending turning away from evil, overlooking it, forgetting. According to this rule, everything is perceived. From the Greek word hedon, hedon, pleasure, enjoyment, the terms hedonism and hedonist are derived, denoting the teaching and the individuals who seek pleasure as the highest goal of human life. Tolstoy apparently was unaware of his own hedonism. This explains. as condemnation of Schopenauer, the Epicureans, the utilitarians, and Mohammedanism for their hedonism. It would, however, be a gross scholarly error to seek principled consistency and systematic philosophy, a philosophical thoughtfulness in Tolstoy.

This is the next step. You shut evil out because it's disruptive. Over time, you stop believing in it at all. It doesn't exist. Now, we're surrounded by it to such an extent that there's no way to get there in 2026. It is possible to live that way when he was writing, say, in the 1850, 1860s, 1870s, whenever. And it's true that, you know, and I don't know where Tolstoy condemned Islam. I've read about him on Schopenhauer and utilitarians, which is funny, I have to find it where he condemned Islam. I don't know where that is.

Because Russia was regularly at war with Islam at the time, but that's the foundation. He's condemning everyone else on the hedonism that he himself makes the center of his life without realizing it. See, when you're in denial, you don't know you're in denial. That's what makes it denial. And you sound ridiculous for that very reason.

So now, again, he's right, though. Tolstoy is not a philosopher. He was a literary giant, no doubt, who had some philosophical opinions, and that's as far as it goes. What he accepts begins to be systematically filtered, reinterpreted, and distorted. The moral hedonist fails to see

what is actually given to him and see something other than what truly exist. He values experience not for objective fidelity and accuracy, or for its correspondence to his subjective moods, and the fantasies to grow out of them. He learns to fantasize an experience and to experience his fantasies as reality. His worldview takes on the characteristics of an idealic, non-objective nature. It's understandable how this all affects his life teaching. especially when he touches on the issue of resisting evil with violence. Only through misunderstanding can one see him as a teacher and leader.

And this is the next step after that. He starts seeing his state of being as something he then projects on everybody. And everyone would just listen to him and lived this way. We would have no problems. You would have no wars. We would have no governments. you know and so he goes beyond

just rejecting the existence of evil he starts seeing it he starts living in the fantasy world which the regime as we all know today it lives in and when you read his novels especially Anna Karinna

there's tremendous experience that goes into that I have an article on the red pill in Anna Corridina, probably the first time the red pill had ever been expressed in literary form was in that book. So that sort of thing,

the Cossacks, one of my favorites from him. You know, that sounds very different from this stuff. He talks about a very complicated society. sin and in its consequences. But I'm not sure how he could be pro-Cossack. I mean, he was sort of, he never talked to the religion, obviously. So again, he's very inconsistent.

But if you, it's almost like, you know, drug addiction. I think you're getting the, most people are getting that, this sense. This is a, this is a, I don't know if it's the final step or not, but this is the next step where you see it and everybody else. Evil doesn't exist. Evil can exist. And you project your own sense of hedonism onto everyone. And, you know, and that's, now you live in delusion.

It is also clear that moral hedonism damages a man's person, man's personal character. Yeah, sorry about that. No problem. A state of tenderness and absorption not only fails to include the will, but dismisses it as a principle that is, on the one hand, unnecessary, and on the other, tense, constraining, and therefore hindering dissolution and fluidity. For the will, it does not dissolve the soul, but gathers and concentrates it. It does not immerse it in a boundless, limitless flow, but creates boundaries and form. It is not abstract, but definitive and definite.

It cannot say a blissfully accepting yes to everything, but also requires a firm, well-founded negation. Therefore, hedonistic tenderness, enveloping the soul and capturing its senses, draws it into a kind of weakness of will, expressed sometimes as indifference, sometimes as outright hostility to all volitional impulses and tasks. You know, when you reach the state that Eileen is talking about, it is very convenient because now you have no obligations in the society. I do what I do, and I think you do too, I have a sense of obligation to God and the truth and reality,

which is far away, you know, from the people who rule us. But it does damage a man's character. But it's also, if you don't use something, any faculty you might have, if you don't use it, it's going to wither. And it becomes very convenient for somebody who doesn't believe in evil, whatever they might say, because that means they don't have to deal with it at all. Other people will.

And that's another inconsistency. Of course, other people, you know, Russia wouldn't exist, you know, without the confrontation against evil, with evil. And he doesn't get into that very much. But as I've said before, he lives in a very, it lives a fairly privileged life at this point when he was writing this stuff that most people don't have

but once your will to confront it's just not used for a long period of time it with us away and now you can't do it so yeah this is incredibly inconsistent with so much of his writing but

you know I think what we're talking about is very much an internal I want to say dopamine, but, you know, dissolving the soul, which is not what the soul is not dissolved, ever under any intelligent psychology. Yeah, we're talking about something like drug addiction here. Love, professed and preached by moralists, turns out to be a weak-willed or passively volitional state. This love does not strengthen character by confronting forces and forging the spiritual center of the personality, but gradually weakens it. It does not formulate the personal spirit, but delights the soul with infinity and uncertainty. It weans it from persistent denial and draws it to the

all-accepting and all-reconciling neutrality. Such a weak-willed love is no longer an act of emotion, for emotion is not hostile to the will, but needs it and teaches rapprochement with it. But it is not a passive effect either. For effect... for effect in its very depths cannot be abstract. Just as a wound is impossible without a wounding arrow. This weak-willed love of the hedonistic moralist is rather a mood that easily co-exists with both lack of will and abstraction. Abstraction, of course, is used in the Higalian sense as something very incomplete.

Now, as I'm in the midst of putting together the next five chapters, love is defined in great detail by Ilyan. And finally, and we see that today. We see the word being abused everywhere. And it's considered something along the lines of universal giving in. You know, take pure neutrality, which is such a compound. I always thought that libertarians, at least some of them, you say you're a libertarian, you don't really have to take a political,

position. Just let everyone do what they want to do. That's very convenient. And of course, not all libertarians have that point of view, but it seems to be a compound to me. And I love his using the word all reconciling neutrality. Well, it is going to be all reconciling neutrality when you are in this state of mind that he has formulated here. And so the people who create these intentional communities in America, the Owenites and everything else, they build these without having any real, without having any real understanding of what might happen to them. If they're in this state, and I think many of them are, the hippies certainly were, you know, made much easier by drugs, they actually thought they were building a new society,

and they did no such thing. And thank God that the boomer generation created the hippies is on its way out. As a weak-willed mood, the love is sentimental, and as an abstract mood, this love is aimless. It carries neither a spiritual task nor a spiritual responsibility. It is a feeling that saturates itself. It is not a beginning, but an end, not an outcome, but a completion, not a step, but an achievement. It is a sweet, intrinsic value or an intrinsic pleasure. and he who abides within it and allows nothing external to disturb him is declared right.

Can such a weak-willed and sentimental character, consciously extinguishing the essence of heroism within himself, blissfully drowning in a boundless and aimless mood, yet consciously asserting his own righteousness as the only an exemplary one for all people, can he pose and resolve the heroic problem of resistance to evil? It is not clear that, by solving this problem, he will create more temptation. Is it, I'm sorry, let me repeat that sentence, is it not clear that by solving this problem, he will create more temptations for weak willed and overworked souls and strengthening and enlightening a person on the right path? Regardless of your previous experience, if you have gone in the Tolstoyan way and you live in

that frame of mind, let's say you're in a position where you can live that frame of mind, after a while, all your other, as I said before, all your other faculties are withered. They're, you know, and therefore, they're the last group of people who can talk about evil.

They're the last people who can talk about resistance to anything. Whatever experience they may have had in the past has been swaddled up in this. And they believe that this is from grace. Now, whether or not Tulsa, I personally believe that, but certainly, you know, the so-called Christian anarchists today are just leftists. You know, they love the word anarchists, you know, the Catholic worker and things like that. You know, believers had some anarchistic tendencies. Slavophilism had a strong sense of anarchism, but they did believe in the state.

but a state that's very far away they had tendencies towards that. But they didn't believe this kind of thing. And no one can talk about the problems that face the society who's in this state of mind or the mood, as he calls it. And, you know, and Tolstoy, by this point in his life, I'm not sure that he was able to.

and yet you see in all of his novels this tremendous conception of right and wrong good versus evil red pill you know red pill blue pill

in relationships with tremendous insight and yet this is his this is his philosophical and semi theological point of view of course it was done later in this life and it's much easier to be like that when you're much older

but you have just, you end up with crippled people. It's really what he's trying to get to here, if you're in this state of mind for long. Furthermore, strange as it may seem at first glance, such false love not only fails to bring the lover closer to other people and does not introduce him to a single living system of togetherness, solidarity, and community, but, on the contrary, separates him from it, sets him in opposition and reinforce, forces this opposition with a peculiar, philosophically justifiable, practical indifference to their fate. This peculiarity is explained, on the one hand, moralistic approach to love. On the other hand,

its pleasurable effect. Yeah, you could tell I'm getting tired translating here. It was philosophically unjustifiable. It may be logically justifiable if you set the parameters, but you're the one setting the parameters. The point he's trying to make overall here is, is this dissolved soul, this sense of oneness with the world that the hippies all talked about. This universal love does not create community. It's in fact the opposite of community. They were unable to deal with community this way. There's anybody who wasn't, you know, this was, and again, they approach people through hedonistic arguments.

This is what will make you happy. Not, not this is what's true, but this is what will make you happy. When you start feeling yourself as one with the world, you'll never be the same man again. And they are certainly right to say that. Morality demands compassion from man, compels it, and reproaches him for its absence. in this way it focuses man's attention on himself, accustoming him to a peculiar, sometimes refined to egocentrism. The moralizing person is interested primarily, sometimes exclusively, in what he himself experiences and reproaching himself, he strives to introduce new, morally valuable experiences

into his personal life. It is interesting to note that this naive egocentrism also appears in relation to the state. Compare the entire system of arguments in the kingdom of God, page 88. Quote, I no longer need a state. I do not need to separate myself from other peoples. I do not need all those government institutions. I do not need either administration or courts, end quote. You know, I know the context of this, and it doesn't help them. The Kingdom of God is a central book on his point of view of philosophical And what he says here under the circumstances is correct

He really doesn't But the reason he doesn't Is because he lives in a healthy society That comes about by confronting evil By force in many other ways And with its borders protected by a first-rate army. You know, and he just, there's a short circuit in the brain

talking about himself saying, I don't need these things. You know, he was a king in his little, he had enough service by that point. Of course, he had employees. Yes, he didn't need to state. He was the state. So, but why he was in that position is a separate matter. And yes, it's as naive as it sounds.

If he succeeds in this and begins to experience and live the sweetness of sentimental moods, then the established egocentrism not only does not weaken or disappear, but is reinforced and strengthened in the delighted soul. This is why, for the sentimental moralist, what is essential in his moods is not the external beloved object, but himself, the loving subject. The important thing is that I sympathized, and this is morally more important, more valuable, and more physically real than the state of, or psychically real, than the state of the one

toward whom I have a compassionate attitude. It is necessary that I tenderly regret, then I will be blissful. And in comparison with this event of bliss that has begun within me, the fate of the object I desire decisively recedes into the background. The point is not that someone suffers.

Suffering is even useful for people. Now, that's not a quote. He's just putting how others think using quotation mark. But it's a philosophically

powerful idea here that the object, say other people, institutions, whatever the other object is, When you're focused on the dissolution of the soul, you could show them all kinds of sympathy. But again, they have nothing to do with it. They're just occasions for it. And they only really have value to the extent that they share your desire to create this blissful psychic existence.

Now, how many people actually really felt this? I know that there's been our Orthodox Hesicus and Mount Dalthos who have, but it does not dissolve the soul. It certainly makes distinctions. That's a big difference between that and Tolstoy. It has some superficial similarities, but they are not the same. and that has to be taken care of right away. Because some of this same language is used among hermits,

not just in Mount Athos, but I'm thinking about, I was reading about that recently, going way back, but under no circumstances, does it have this pure universal sympathy? It can't exist. And by the way, it's 94 degrees here. the real feel is a hundred and eight last time I checked. This isn't right. This just isn't right.

Moving on. My lord. It is remarkable that Tolstoy recalls this usefulness of suffering only when this reference reinforces the correctness of the moralist and decisively does not take it into account when discussing social and pedagogical work. The point is not that in the external relations and affairs of people, some of the, happened or did not happen, that is not in our power, but in God's will. Everyone should not weigh the motives and intentions of a person so heavily that an act is directly declared to be morally perfect, the less the person who committed it thought about its consequences. The whole point is that I internally fulfill the will of God, that is, love, and the rest is

not in my power, and therefore it does not determine my future work. that's that's the ultimate compound and I think that a lot of people may I mean I can't read their minds but it makes sense to me that a lot of people would would approach this um for that very convenient point of view I don't longer have responsibilities uh and you know why because God will take care of everything you know um God's plan involves our will you know the the underlying assumption here that God has negated free will entirely. And he does this in this state of mind. Is this a free will?

Or he's just assuming everything that occurs outside of me is the will of God, and hence, I don't have to worry about it. I have no obligation towards it. Now, he's been saying this for a few paragraphs now, but it's a very powerful statement to make. This is why the sentimental moralist false love does not draw his soul away from himself or free it from its own burdens and personal limitations, but rather reinforces them. A sentimental man does not immerse himself in what he loves, does not identify with the beloved

and does not forget himself. Therefore, he does not construct the beloved object for this requires shifting the goal center of his life from himself to it. Such a moralist is ego-centered, and precisely because of this, his love proves practically lifeless. He extols it, and he extols it and calls for it. What he extols is a state of inner envelopment and practical ineffectiveness. I don't know how you can live with such a person. But I do disagree with Elyne here that he doesn't construct it. I think that's precisely what's going on here. He does construct it. He does construct the world around him such that he doesn't have to worry about it. I mean, to that extent, I guess. he may have meant something different, but to that extent, you know, I can reconstruct

to them my very perception, because I see even around me, let alone common sense. But that becomes, you know, they construct it because they live this way. But after a while, once you're in this state that aliens talking about, that's no longer a problem. it almost becomes there are no other people and and this becomes very dangerous and it is egocentric um and inner envelopment and practical ineffectiveness that that's a wonderful way to put it uh envelopment meaning the dissolution of the soul including the will and yet practically in the real world you could do nothing this is a love that is abstractly extensive and socially flaccid. Indifference are the consequences of one's actions into the public good.

Its motto is expressed in the words, leave others to their own devices and live a good life yourself. The loving subject turns out to be incomparably more important than the beloved object, and it is clear that at the moment when the sentimental soul has to choose between one and the other, it, remaining true to its nature and its principles, stops its choice on the subject and his precious moral rightness. we're coming to the end of this five chapters. In the next five, he gets into this far more deeply.

You know, if choosing one or the other, he has to remain self-absorbed. And it sounds harsh to say this, leave others to their own devices with good life yourself. You know, it keeps you from having to do anything, really, except have this have this point of view. And so the ego, the loving subject, turns it be far more important than what is what is loved. And what he gets into in the next five chapters is this concept, can you love everything? Is there ever such a person that could love everything in the universe

equally? How ridiculous is that idea? And so he's starting that, introducing that concept right here. This does not mean that the sentimental moralist rejects all self-sacrifice and is completely incapable of it. There are such acute cases when he directly advises putting himself in the place of the one being killed or sacrificing one's own life. However, upon closer analysis, it becomes clear that he is sacrificing his life not to save anything, but for the sake of his own righteousness. Four, the answer must take into account precisely those cases in which only physical resistance to the oppressor can save the beloved, and not offering oneself as a substitute for the victim being killed. If a strong-willed and heroic, loving soul is faced with the task of

saving a loved one from death, or correspondingly protecting the family, church, or homeland from rapists and evildoers, then it cannot consider its task fulfilled if it righteously perishes along with the one being saved, and moreover perishes because it does not dare to transgress the limit of its own moral right of its moral righteousness yeah you know if there's violence being done towards you um you have to sacrifice your own there is no resistance to this because Tolstoy will say we'll talk about this later but he'll say that you know you don't know what he's going to do even if he screams at the top of his lungs you're not sure if you're actually going to be killed therefore you can't kill him but this is not a matter of being so you know a strong-willed

them. This is not martyrdom at all. This comes from having a weak will. This comes from not being able to do anything anymore. You know, and that's what he says here. You know, the strong-willed heroic soul protecting family church, him. You know, yes, he may be a martyr. That's true. But not to Stoian.

If they're consistent, and I don't think they are all the time, but and they're about to be killed, they have to just kind of stand there. They could start reasoning with the person. They could start quoting things from the New Testament. But I don't think, I don't think it's going to be effective. That is not the same thing as Martyrton. We've got less than a page left in this chapter. I say we finish it out.

Let's finish it out. All right. The sentimental moralist loves only to the limits of his personal moral righteousness. For the salvation of his beloved, he is willing, in extreme cases, to sacrifice his life, but not his moral integrity. True, he loves and is ready to defend that which he loves, but only until physical resistance is needed, something he considers morally forbidden as sinful, shameful violence. Therefore, if Lyke confronts him with the need to choose between saving his beloved and saving

his own righteousness, he unhesitatingly saves his own righteousness, even in a at the cost of its mortal end and betrays all else. His sacrifice is made not on the altar of his beloved, but on the altar of his own moral perfection. Yeah, he's deepening the same argument we just talked about. He will sacrifice others, and he has to sacrifice himself. Tolstoy, every time I think there's got to be a limit here, no, he goes even beyond it.

Reading Tolstoy on these matters, like the kingdom of God is within you, all that. You think that there's no, there's no basement, no, the basement keeps going down. And he gets more and more extreme. So he will not save his beloved. But his beloved is everything, you know, in this mentality. But let's say a husband and wife, no, he will betray his wife. but this is not this is not any kind of sacrifice. This is just to show my moral perfection.

I do not believe in violence. And, you know, Tolstoy will say that's exactly what you do. This is what defines the limits of his egocentric love. Of course, this is not a small thing that a man values his moral. impeccability. However, it is precisely this devotion to his own virtue that reveals how little he is devoted to anything that is not virtuous. If a rapist attacks a woman, the moralist loves, and at that moment he would prefer that he be killed, at least himself, then all his love turns out to be affected, beautiful words. It is discovered that his love is limited by its own nature,

that these limits condemn it to a kind of practical desertion and betrayal. And moreover, at the most critical moment, that such a man does not dare to love selflessly, completely, and heroically, for fear of sinning, and that all his love is a form of practical indifference to the supposedly beloved object. You know, this starts off, you know, Tolstoy as a Christian anarchist movement. But it's based on only a few lines in the New Testament. How long does it take for it to be totally secular?

That's a slippery slope. It's very quickly. It turns out to be just a, in their view, it's a Spinoza, like Spinoza for a lot of reasons, this determinism, you know, yes, you would prefer that he'd be killed if there was an option, but I don't know how that would ever come about. But again, that's not martyrdom.

That's just showing how morally perfect he is. And the same thing would go for the killer. If the killer murders his wife and the husband is still there, he doesn't want to kill anymore for some reason, you have to treat that man the same way you would treat anybody else. And this is where it just fights human nature. in every way possible. Yes, he is that extreme. It is clear that if the emphasis of love lay not on the loving subjects themselves,

but on the beloved object, then resorting to physical resistance would not become an insurmountable obstacle. The rescuer would save the beloved using violence without reflecting on possible sin or trembling before their own possible moral imperfections, for they would be driven by genuine love and necessity. they would defer moral judgment upon themselves, and this untimely judgment would not plunge them at the moment of action into disunity, hesitation, weakness of will, and practical betrayal.

Yeah, this is a, he's clarifying it a bit. He's saying that if you truly love, not in his tostoyan way, but if a man truly loves his wife or his nation or his church, whatever it might be. and you show it by it unfortunately and it happened not that long ago and as he was writing this physical resistance is obvious and almost instinctual he's not going to be trembling over his own moral imperfections be driven by genuine love and how like he says necessity

in other words it comes straight out of it doesn't think he has any choice as a result, then that's true martyrdom in the Christian sense. But when everything is focused on you, you will not do that. And any sacrifice you make is for you.

And that's what the point here. This is a very powerful point here. And he's essentially saying that loving everything is not possible. Because if you truly love these things in your life, why if, you know, people from your family, you wouldn't have to. You'd have no choice with resist evil against them. That would be, that's a sign that you actually love them rather than being focused entirely and exclusively on your own alleged righteousness.

It is also clear that sentimental love does not unite people, but divides them. Indeed, if each person following the rule of subjective morality, abandon others to their own divisional. concerned with their own moral innocence, what would emerge would not be a fraternal unity, but a dispersal of passive atoms turned away from each other. Everyone would be immersed, each in themselves and for themselves, in a self-sufficient process of moralizing self-affection, and each would be aware that at the critical moment of attack they will find in others nothing but weak-willed and passive compassion, or, at best, a readiness to be worn out, forced, and slaughtered along with them. This, you know, if they're going to be consistent about this,

and there are plenty of people who believe this, if you truly believe this, it will end up being a Hobbesian situation. Just passive atoms. You know, I think Hobbs coined the term atomism, the founder of the modern world, I believe is Thomas Holmes, and it was based on that. not Tolstoyanism, of course, but being Adams having no real connection with anyone else. But Tolstoy will lead to that, whether he likes it or not.

Everyone will be immersed in themselves, so it won't be a war of all against all, it will let's be a slaughter. And whether your slaughter too is irrelevant, so long as this alleged moral righteousness is fulfilled. So he's just clarifying this argument maybe a little bit too long, but I think we're getting the picture here. It is difficult to imagine the socially corrupting current such a pervasive attitude would introduce into the life of humanity if all people followed the calls of sentimental morality. Quote, cease to care about external and common affairs, end quote, and without thinking about unity and the consequences of their actions, eradicated from their lives to principles of mutual. defense, joint action against oppressors and solidarity against criminality. A monstrous program would be realized, the self-dissolution of good in the world, the mutual betrayal of morally

noble souls, and all this from an exorbitant morality and under the name of mutual love. Fortunately for humanity, a spiritually healthy instinct will not allow it to fall into such a collapse. It's amazing during Vietnam, up until the draft was a little. eliminated in 1973, how many people suddenly converted to Tolstoyan views. I don't believe in violence, you know. Therefore, I want to be, I want to have a deferment. I'm a tostoyan or something like that. Or a Quaker, assuming that they believe all of this into this extremity.

But if everyone lived this way, say everyone in your society lived this way, it would just be evil with this slaughter everybody, and it would be the end of it. You know, they have these small communities. I'm not sure what their purpose is, other than if they, you know, creating, you know, the only way out of this is to create an entire, the entire world believing like this.

But if the entire world, the entire universe, believe this way, all it would take is one person to start killing them. You know, he's going to get away with it. They don't believe in any kind of violence. and whoever that person is, he's going to end up being king of everything. But I think at some point, we're starting to realize that this isn't love at all. We know in America in 2026, the abuse of that word is inexcusable anymore. This isn't love.

Killing to protect your beloved is not murder. Murder is criminal. Killing isn't necessarily murder. you know, people on death row are not murdered. They are, they are killed. So, it would just take one person. And matter how peaceful you might be, you know, and Thomas Hobbs's point of view,

you would still have to fortify your home. You have to, you know, all it would take is just a handful of people to force them on people. You'd have to protect yourself. But here, it's even worse. All it would take, if the, entire world believed in Tolstoy and lived this way. Just a small group of people would end up being the master of everything.

They start slaughtering everyone until, you know, eventually they would be stopped because this is nonsense. But if they weren't stopped, they would be masters of the world. And they would keep them in utter servitude. The ring of the survivors and utter servitude. And that's a fact. And that would be, again, an inescapable conclusion of Tolstoy's point of view.

And now he doesn't talk about this very much, but if he did, even everything we know about him, he would say, yeah, so be it. All righty. We'll have a new chapter ready to go on the next episode. You better get to translate in, Mr. Yeah, I am.

I get a headache every time. The machine helps a little bit, but you can't trust it. So I have to go in myself and do a lot of the work. You could tell where I'm getting tired in certain places. Always get a headache. But yes, it will be completed. What day is today?

It's today Wednesday. Wednesday. It will be completed before Saturday. No problem. Okay. Cool. Everybody go over to the show notes. Go over to the description.

There's the videos and donate to Dr. Johnson, sign up for the Patreon and buy his new book. Go show him some love. And we'll be back in a few days. Thank you, Dr. Johnson. Thank you, my friend. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of Unresistance to Evil by Force by Ivan Aline, Dr. Johnson.

What's happening today? Did you know that there's an entire website dedicated to listing all the songs in rock that have the cowbell. And even more than that, I contributed to it. Because it didn't have Matthew Sweets into your drug. That upset me. And I sent it to them. And now it's on there.

They want to capture every single rock song that had a cowbell after the SNL skit did so well. In addition to that, in addition to that, I have two main coons. I've one at my feet, the little one, and the big one, a very big one. next to me on the table. She takes up the whole table.

She's nowhere near stuff growing yet. She's going to keep growing. She's already monstrous, I tell you. And the little one's still kind of little, but her tail is getting poofier and poofier by the day. So those are the two things that have me preoccupied today. That's awesome.

And maybe we should mention we are recording this on Independence Day. I think that that's the best thing, the best way to refer to the day is a day of independence and not, you know, July 4th is just another, I think it's another way to make you forget exactly, exactly why they started shooting, shooting people. Well, going back 20 years now, I usually play a lot of Serbian nationalist music on July 4th. It's actually kind of a long story. But I've been listening to the Belgrade, Syndicot, and groups like that. I do it every July 4th. It's my thing. All right.

Here we go. Starting Chapter 11. Nialism and pity. The idea of love advanced by Leo Tolstoy and his followers, however, suffers not only from traits of pleasure-seeking, weakness of will, sentimentality, egocentrism, and antisocial behavior. it describes and affirms an ideal state as an ideal state of feeling that is, in a certain sense, demonic. And this characteristic of sentimental love is perhaps of greatest significance for the problem of resistance to evil. I think the listeners need to know how I suffered over this thing. It was not that I mind.

I'm not complaining. This is what I do. but I spent a ridiculous number of hours. I mean, Google Translator is absolutely useless with this kind of thing, so I had to do most of it myself, and I got the worst headaches, but hey, it's a labor of love, but that's the effort I put into this to make it,

not just, you know, not just to translate it, but to make it readable and to have it make sense to our audience. We appreciate that. I'll talk you about, after we stop recording, I'll mention possibly something else that might be a good translator. See, if you'll send me something, I'll try and plug it in there, see what happens. Well, I mean, I'll, oh, I use Yandex sometimes too, but that's only as a way to check things. You can never depend on it, you know, but it does help quite a bit. As has already been shown, Tolstoy's entire worldview was grown by him from moral theory,

which replaced or displaced all of their sources of spirituality in men, devaluing them or eliminating them altogether. Thus, moral experience replaces religious experience and takes its place. Morality is superior to religion in his mind. It judges all religious content by its own criterion and asserts the limits of its experience as binding on religion. The full depth of religious perception, religious mystery and symbolism, the entire richness of positive religion is critically and skeptically forced through the stifling confines

of personal moral experience, half blind, limited, and complacent. And we know what this is like in our world today. What he's saying here is that moral theory is simply more important than theology. Yeah, every once in a while, you know, Tolstoy will use. a line from the New Testament, but for the most part, this is, you know, sentimental moralism, as he calls it. And like various kinds of ecumenism, liberalism today, theologies, you know, institutional theologies are all forced through that procrustian bed, so to speak. And he's saying it's the same thing here. And I think I said this last week,

but Tolstoyanism became secular very, very quickly. Because, It really wasn't a doctrine of theology whatsoever. Theology wasn't necessary to it. But given who he was talking to at the time, a use of the New Testament was necessary, and even there are very limited. So, you know, even in his own mind, theology wasn't all that interesting.

Moral theory was far more important and completely outshone the theology and the theology eventually dropped out after his death. Yeah, this is very common today, especially when you'd talk about immigration. As soon as you mention, start mentioning race or culture, anything like that, there's a certain segment of Christianity which interrupts you and says, well, you can't be a Christian and be racist. I've heard that before. Believe it or not, I've heard that before.

Or you can't be, you can't talk about the Jews in a negative way collectively and be a Christian. I mean, if someone wants to say that, then I guess you can't either be God man either because Jesus Christ was probably one, probably the most critical of the Jewish people in the history of mankind. Oh, critical, difficult, you know, as I always say, there's not a single place. in the New Testament where he's shown smiling or laughing. And that's not an accident. Same thing for all the prophets. They were extremely harsh on everyone around them. It's a very important point.

And, you know, it all comes from the ignorance of the Old Testament. And all my papers concerning race, I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't start off wanting to talk about race. Race was forced on me through very, things like immigration and the attack on Europe, it's forced on us. Would we want to talk about it or not. Now, I usually don't bring a lot of this stuff up in church. It's not, you know, unless there's someone asked me about it, but there is a theological element to it. I think there's even a theological element to being opposed to mixed marriages. This is the great prophet Ezra talks about

to a great extent. But ignorance of the Old Testament leads to a Tolstoyan point of view, where the only thing that these people know was one or two lines from something that Jesus said in the New Testament, and that's what they think Christianity is. They don't even know the prophets. The condemnation of mixed marriages in the Old Testament went on and on and on and on and on. And it wasn't merely, I mean, ethnicity and theology often went hand in hand. Sometimes it's hard to tell which one.

So it really was both. Ezra went so far as to say, you dissolve it. I don't care what else you have to do. You dissolve it now if you have a marriage with a non-Israelite. And so because they don't know anything about the Old Testament, they come to this point of view. And it makes them sound smart. It makes them sound moral.

And people love being moral without having to sacrifice anything. they love that so that's where you get that from yeah i like to point out to people that the great commission um matthew 28 19 and 20 is not telling people to go to all nations and destroy them and to subvert them and to you know change them is saying to go there and preach the gospel to them yeah nowhere is that commanded No. Armed with, quote unquote, simple common sense, in all its shallow impoverishment, the moralist sorts through and analyzes the dogmat and rights of the Christian church,

dismissing everything that seems strange and incomprehensible, and accepting each short-sighted observation as a manifestation of critical honesty and wisdom. The idea that the religious dimension permeates, sanctifies, and deepens the entire spiritual culture, and that to this extent the everyday Philistine mind, with its sobriety and prosaic nature, loses its competence, remains alien to him. For he does not see that every spiritual state of man, and not only the moral, places him face to face, places him before the face of God, gives him a living intrinsically valuable experience of mystery and the revelation hidden in mystery.

and apparently not suspecting that the work he is concerned with is, in a deep sense, a vulgar matter. He mocks the mystery and depth that are inaccessible to him and gives his rational moral worldview the character of religious nihilism. And I'm pretty sure that's what we just said. I love the simple common sense. We hear this all the time. Shallow impoverishment. These are people who don't understand what Christian culture is. They've never lived in one.

Even when they try to be knowledgeable, they look at the older rituals of actual Christians. I'm not talking about Protestantism. That was a solvent, a destroyer. But whether east or west, because they don't understand it, they can't read the symbols. They dismiss it. It's all out of ignorance. And they believe that they're somehow critical in doing this. This happens in academia.

This happens. And they bet their souls on this nonsense. this is why, you know, your average individual, even an average educated individual, can't be doing this stuff. They don't understand what these things mean. The peasant, whether literate or not, understood the symbolism in church, understood far more than the typical academic, even the academic who specializes in this kind of thing, will ever do. He understands that the inside of the, I'm talking about the literal temple, literal church itself, is a historical object

showing everything from the fall to the end of the world in various symbols well this type of person and especially your typical Protestant has no idea they wouldn't know what that means under any circumstances

and it doesn't line up with what they think these are the same people who think that Martin Luther King is a church father there were some Catholic churches who did have and all the sort of obviously who had Martin Luther King with a halo around his head, which is, you know, blasphemy to a most extreme degree. And, of course, Protestantism has that, most of it has that anyway. But they actually think that they're being critical and intelligent,

through their ignorance, not understanding what an actual Christian culture is. They have no experience with it. They don't understand it. And they usually end up hating or negating things they don't understand. And it is that, you know, this Philistianism, this, you know, the Protestant societies are nominalists. They have no conception of what a culture is. You know, you own to a Protestant household and they're nothing but contemporary art and whatever, you know, it's a secular place. And because they don't get it, they dismiss it. And it's maddening.

And it goes on all the time then and now. Similarly, moral experience asserts its supremacy in the reign of science. Failing to recognize a spiritual intrinsic value of truth and its measurement, the moralist considers himself the supreme judge of all that the scientist does. He judges his work and its purpose, measuring everything by the measure of moral benefit or harm. All scientific culture, insofar as it does not serve the tasks of sentimental morality and does not supply the moralist with the material he needs is declared a bad and harmful matter, the product of idle curiosity, professional vanity, and deception.

Mental labor is not labor at all, but the simulation and chatter of a lazy and cunning person. Yeah, the Russian term for science refers to any kind of systematized knowledge. You know, it could be literature. You know, it could be political science. This doesn't have to never study a big guy in, you know, chemistry or, or biology. So the height of this was socialist realism in the USSR, where the party claiming to have unlocked the purpose of history

and coming to the end of it with their own rule, then says there's no reason for any kind of art other than what shows our victory. That was the only thing that they permitted. That was the most extreme version of this. So any of these idiologues are going to look at any work, even the heart sciences, all the way down to the literary critic. And if it doesn't support their agenda, they're going to reject it. And this paragraph comes from the one before it.

And generally speaking, that too comes from ignorance. You can't, you know, it's like the IQ issue. These people claim to believe science until they don't. and because that rejects their agenda, they want to reject that. Whether sure or not it doesn't matter. It's something they have to simply cut off. It's a bad and harmful matter, as Elyn would say. All spiritual culture is cultivated and supported here.

For in reality, every human spiritual state conceals some truth and brings them some insight. Are the boundaries of personal spiritual experience legitimated here too? scientific knowledge is viewed from the perspective of moral utilitarianism, and this imbues the entire worldview with a peculiar character of scientific nihilism. The same moral utilitarianism triumphs in relation to art. The intrinsic value of artistic vision is rejected, and art is transformed into a means serving morality and moral goals. Artistry is tolerated if it carries within itself a morally useful lesson, accessible to all people throughout the world, and is rejected as a product of idleness and a manifestation of depravity if it does not carry

such a lesson or if it teaches something morally unrecognized. Any work of art that does not speak to the personal experience of the moral utilitarian is rejected and ridiculed, but any morally useful product is approved and extolled, often despite its aesthetic inconsistency? Well, I'm assuming that most of our listeners know what utilitarianism is, but just in case they don't. It was an ideology that in our modern form was developed by Jeremy Bentham, and it's actually pretty simple.

It's pure consequentialism. It comes down to a policy that either a government or a person should follow is that which maximizes the amount of pleasure and satisfaction in the world and minimizes pain and dissatisfaction. And therefore, someone like Bentham, or Adam Smith, who was a follower of Bentham and was a utilitarian, didn't talk about, you know, a right to private property. It's just that having private property created the most good, created the most beneficial society. Therefore, it should be maintained. They don't talk about rights.

They don't talk about anything like that. It's just that things should exist because they produce. produce results, produce results that we like, that we find pleasurable, and we have to get rid of those things that cause pain and that cause harm. So everything else, every other type of system, metaphysical or otherwise, should be eliminated. I mean, Jeremy Bentham tried to, he loved writing constitutions for different countries and sending it to them, saying this is how your country should be run. A couple of Latin America, too, if I'm not mistaken. but in general he's saying

but in general he's saying the same thing here go to any modern art museum and you'll see the liberal agenda the leftist agenda everywhere it's everywhere the garbage that you're seeing serves that agenda in a very broad sense

monarchist I'm sorry monarchist anarchist Marxist liberalism in its broadest sense ideology is far more important than the work of art itself. And again, socialist realism being the most extreme version of this. Because really in the Soviet system, we had reached, you know, the end of history.

So why do we need art at all? Things like abstraction and any kind of, any other kind of school of art of any sort. That's from alienated people. from times where the working class was suffering. But they're not now, so we don't need that kind of thing. No one is crying out to the heavens for help. And, you know, Russell Kirk did call Marxism a form of utilitarianism. It's probably the case.

But, and the same thing goes for music. You know, our music doesn't get published too much. I don't remember I was in grad school when I first heard of Rage Against the Machine. where you had an openly communist group being financed by corporate America and being pushed on every TV station, every late night talk show. And that did something to me. This doesn't make any sense. And it shows you what a mockery of Marxism really is. It's always been a plaything of the rich.

On the other hand, our people couldn't get a record deal if no matter what. God, you know, even moderates libertarians like, like Ted Nugent, can barely function anymore because of a few nasty things they say. So everything has to be, ultimately, it comes down to a totalitarian system. That's what this agenda really is. They think they're anarchists, but the exact opposite is true. As I said this before as well. The mind of the moralists consistently draws all conclusions. illusions, showing off its straightforwardness and paradoxes.

The aesthetic dimension is distorted and fades away. The all-pervading, refining and deepening power of artistic vision, called not to moralize but to see the divine in images and to depict the form of the human spirit, weakens and fades, giving way to the moral idea. The moralist strives to impose on art something alien to it and thus loses its originality, its dignity and its calling. He himself sees this, recognizes it, and articulates it in the form of a specific principle and doctrine, thereby imbueing his entire theory with a peculiar aesthetic nihilism.

Remember, he's not necessarily talking about Tolstoy as a man or as a writer. He's also talking about his followers and these communities that were functioning and the entire mentality that surrounds him, not just him personally. his works of art were or something you know it's a must read for any any intelligent person no question about it especially anna carinana i think and the cossacks and a few others what he's saying here is that this is a mentality that comes from it and this is the mentality that informs Tolstoy's view on on violence and resisting evil so he's not necessarily pointing the finger at Tolstoy personally but the nature of this morality

leads to this kind of thinking. Even more acute is the denial with which the moralists approach law in the state. The spiritual necessity and function of legal consciousness completely alludes him. This entire sphere of soul-forming spiritual experience says nothing to his personal well-being. He sees here only the most superficial appearance of events and deeds. He qualifies this appearance as crude violence and arbitrarily characterizes the intentions hidden behind, the violence as evil, vindictive, selfish, and vicious. Law on the state not only fails to, they would say, not only fails to educate people, but develop in them bad traits and inclinations.

Statesmen respond with contemplatively organized and hypocritically justified evil to the rare attempts at violence emanating from the so-called murderers, robbers, and thieves, and other unfortunate fallen brothers. The sympathy of the moralist is allegedly entirely on the side of these unfortunates and the activity of state-minded patriots is declared, quote, the most empty and, moreover, harmful human activity, end quote. Naturally, as anger falls with particular force on the entire sphere of spirituality. This was a huge part of liberalism in general.

I think it reached its apagy in the 70s, where criminals really aren't criminals. This is why they're opposed to the life imprisonment. They're opposed to the death penalty. They just were raised incorrectly. If they're given the proper training, the proper mentality, they won't be criminals anymore. Now, whether they actually believe that or not is another matter, because revolutionaries tend to open the prisons every time they take over. It did it from, you know, Spain to France to the USSR.

And there is this love affair that the left has to this day with criminal. Or the right kind of criminal, you know, especially in America, the non-white criminals. The same kind of mentality. It's destructive at its root. You know, they'll attack the police at the slightest problem. but make excuses for gangs and criminals. And this has to be explained. This mentality, this, it's more than just sympathy.

It's a romanticization of this kind of criminality. I mean, look at the viciousness with which the so-called Biden Winehouse attacked El Salvador. When they solved their gang problem, they won. It wasn't the methods they used, is that it was successful. That was their problem. Oh, you're hurting these people. No, they're not really criminals deep down, even though the El Salvador state was almost totally disintegrating. That was far less significant than the fact that you may hurt an innocent person once in a while.

And you see, you know, the ACLU has paper after paper saying that the FBI exaggerates the gang problem. Well, gangs outnumber the cops. That's done deliberately. Gangs are better armed than the police are. the gangs are never blamed for anything. The cops does one thing wrong. They're the ones who are in trouble and are attack. And they media, of course, create these anti-police riots.

And all this comes down to this very same thing. These aren't real criminals. They're not evil. In fact, maybe evil doesn't exist. It's just that they're not raised properly. They're not treated right. And therefore, we have to create the conditions where they are. and there won't be criminals anymore.

And yeah, this is a university, you know, hot house nonsense. But it was a core principle of liberalism, maybe less so today than it was in the 70s, but it certainly exists still. The ideological compromise to which state power is forced and in which personal participation is for the citizen a responsibility and honorable burden, the function of protection, the function of suppression, the function of judgment, the function of punishment, the function of the sword, deeply outraged the sentimental soul, and evoke in it words of disgust and stigmatizing outrage.

It is also clear that along with the rejection of law as such, all institutions, relationships, and ways of life formalized by law are also rejected. Landownership, inheritance, money, which in itself is evil, lawsuits, military service, trial, and sentencing. All this is washed away in a stream of indignant denial, ironic ridicule, and graphic defamation. All this, in the eyes of a naive moralist, flaunting his ignorance, deserves only condemnation, rejection, and staunch passive resistance. Well, he is talking about Tolstoy here, because Tolstoy says all of this, despite being a landowner himself, all of these institutions that are listed here have to be destroyed. Because these institutions are the cause of criminality.

All human beings are born equal, somehow. As Rousseau would say, equal and independent, which, of course, the opposite is true. I mean, they're totally dependent, but, you know, Rousseau is famous for it. Liberalism and leftism is known for this. therefore anything that causes inequality unless it can be somehow justified for the benefit of society

has to go and all these institutions are among them this is what the typical anarchists is going to think and what they simply don't realize is that if the state were to disappear tomorrow it wouldn't just be free people living their own life

it would be, you know, the most powerful drug dealer in every city dominating the place like a mafia war war. It would be an oligarchy. The Soviet Union collapsed. That's exactly what happened. You had the oligarchs, people already who were gaining power, took over everything for their own purpose. Now, it's sometimes I really, it's hard for me to believe that they really believe this.

that if the state and all these institutions were to disappear tomorrow that people would be free and happy there would be no crime there would be no oligarchy nothing like that when in fact in the examples we do have of the state collapsing that's exactly what you get you know you get essentially war wars regardless of what label we may call them is essentially what they are people run to them for protection

that's what comes from the collapse of the states, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the origin of serfdom, et cetera. So to say this today, or even in Tolstoy's time, is absolutely absurd. This is just a, they're cut off from actual experience. They live in a bubble made by ideology. And today, of course, it's maintained

through media control and if you're in academia a huge pillar of the regime by conformity by punishment by and of course censorship everywhere

and there's plenty of people who really believe this today every communist system that tried to get it eliminate money had to re-institute it again including everyone from Castro to

Paul Pot. And regardless of that, it doesn't matter. It just, that wasn't real socialism, which is a big, you know, problem for me when people say that. It's such a stupid thing to say. They see that it's failed miserably every time. All of the intentional communities that have tried to do away with these things have failed every time. And it doesn't matter.

One of the things that makes it attractive is that it's very simple. This kind of utilitarianism is really simple to formulate. I just did it. And to have this very simple ideology that gives you immediate answers to all questions makes you sound very intelligent without actually being intelligent at all. This is the worst part of ideology, Marxism, various kinds of liberalism, anarchism. It has answers to all life's questions concerning both sociology and politics. And you don't really have to study everything.

You already have the answers. Michael Oakeshott made a big deal about this in his life. You don't really have to know much if you're an ideologue. You already know the answer. These are fairly simple and simplistic ideologies that anyone could just repeat. And it makes it very attractive for many people. Same thing for the two Testaments. You know, I don't like the idea of separating old from the new.

I think it's all essentially one body of work ending with, you know, revelation, of course. that somehow, because the Old Testament is difficult, it's long, it's complicated, a lot of people get killed in it, we don't want to deal with it, and therefore we won't. We'll just focus on what we want to focus on is a disaster. It leads them to complete ignorance. These are the same people who believe you can pick up a Bible and to start reading it, just anybody, and actually believe that the terms used back then, or the society back then, same as society today. And it's shocking that level of ignorance. And they bet their soul on this

to the extent that it is spiritual at all. They bet their soul on this kind of mentality. And it does deserve condemnation, rejection, and at least passive resistance. The inevitable conclusion of all this rejection is, finally, the denial of the homeland, its existence, its form of government, and the need for its defense. Moral Brotherhood embraces all people, regardless of of race or nationality, and especially regardless of their national affiliation. All are worthy of fraternal compassion, and no one deserves violence. One must give the enemy who takes away everything he takes away everything he takes. One must pity him for what he lacks and invite him to resettle and live together in love

and brotherhood, for man has nothing on earth worth defending to the death, dying, and killing. I don't even know. I mean, this is still very common. More radical Protestant sects of, you know, during the Reformation, the so-called radical Reformation, you had this mentality even in the radical reconstruction after the Civil War. That race doesn't exist. Nations don't exist. And therefore, states shouldn't exist unless they're running it, of course. anarchism is a pure negation.

You know, when they do speak positively about the future world, like Bukhounan and Kropotkin, they speak in generalities of people living the way they want to live, just easily taking over capital and running it for their own purposes. I mean, no conception of what the collapse of all power and actually even all authority would mean and that the maccabellian people in the population wouldn't just take over.

Anarchy is just an negation of things. It's an angry, I don't think you consistently be one. Most anarchists in academia rule with an iron fist when they take over the department, throughout who they want. But yes, this is the final gnosis of these people that the worst thing you could possibly be is a nationalist or racist of any kind, whether or not they believe it exists or not. But you can't really talk about imperialism and then say that nations don't exist.

That doesn't make any sense. Imperialism is bad because it takes over other nations. So without nations, there is no such thing as imperialism. So, and this is this is what they want to. force on the population, which of course is vehemently opposed to their principles anyway. And it's an angry negation. It's not

a positive ideology, just like Marxism. Anarchism is just a more extreme version, especially Bakunan's version. And yet it's fully acceptable and understandable, and you get grant money. The Smithsonian just had this huge anarchist

celebration just a few years ago Rosa Luxembourg in particular you know that this is stuff that no matter how many people they've killed over the years they're still to be worshipped and venerated how badly they've failed these people don't live in the real world

and you still have people also that they don't realize that big money supports all this that all of these leftist groups have corporate America behind them I had a paper where a lot of people did actually, not just me, the financing of the Black Lives Matter, violence came from almost everyone in corporate America as they were burning down their stores or their institutions.

It didn't matter. It didn't make any difference. This was something to be celebrated. And criminality is almost romanticized if it's the right criminal. The sentimental moralist, neither sees nor understands that law is a necessary and sacred attribute of the human spirit, that every human spiritual state is a modification of right and justice, and that it is impossible to safeguard the spiritual flourishing of humanity on earth

outside of a coercive social organization, outside of law, judgment, and the sword. Here, his personal spiritual experience is silent, and his compassionate soul falls into anger and faux prophetic indignation. as a result, his teaching turns out to be a form of legal and patriotic nihilism. In old Russia, you know, the term nihilism was normally defined as somebody who believed entirely in positivism or empiricism, the scientific method. That kind of, that's what a nihilist wants. It wasn't someone who believed in absolutely nothing.

like Pavlov would be an example of a nihilus there. And there should be no other method of reaching any kind of knowledge. There's no other justification for anything except in that way. But his Hegelianism is showing here very much that law is a necessary and a sacred attribute because we're fallen people. We're sinful. We're self-regarding. We can be incredibly stupid.

That criminality often. organizes itself. And we're living in a society where in urban areas, the gangs outnumber the police to a huge degree. In Detroit, they dismantled their anti-gang unit, sliced the department manpower by half, and now you have parts of the city that are no-go areas for cops. this is what you get when the state begins to crumble, not freedom, not flourishing of individuals. And people like to say that, you know, violent crime was going down during a Clinton administration. And that was a common claim.

No, it's just that the police departments were cut in half in that era. Crime was going unpunished. That's why the crime rates were down. It was just being unpunished. didn't, you know, it wasn't being recorded. The entire, and I can't help but think of the defund the police movement that actually existed and functioned, supported by big money. And during that time, you saw the massive upsurge in violent crime

to the point where, you know, you can't really function in certain parts of almost every major American city. Pittsburgh is an exception, thank God. A few other places are. Detroit is an extreme example, as we all know. And gangs have the ACLU giving them lawyers and public support. NGOs internationally, giving them all the support that they need as they arm themselves in a way that the police are not armed. This is what happens when their ideology is put into practice.

but for someone like Tolstoy who lived in compared to our society was almost idyllic he could think in these terms not realizing what would happen because he was rational he thought everyone else was just like him no a lot of people

if not most people are irrational and there's also no reason to believe that people seek pleasure I see people destroying themselves deliberately all the time It's just a very naive and childish view, but it's simple, and simplicity gets followers. With such a blind and naively moralizing approach, the entire vast repository of spiritual culture is emptied and its treasure is cast out. All creative spiritual intensity of the human

spirit is condemned and forbidden, religiously disempowered, ridiculed and degraded, cognitively weakened and blinded, artistically curtailed and enslaved, deprived of rights, defense, and homeland. Man remains at the end of this antispiritual cyclone, a pitiful creature with a single moral dimension, and his highest calling is self-compulsion to weak-willed sentimental pity. The sentimental moralist knows only one dimension of perfection, the moral. For him, the entire essence of the spirit, the entire life of the spirit, is reduced to moral self-improvement, and all moral achievement is reduced to saturating the soul with compassionate, sympathy. And as a result of this, all human understanding of God and evil becomes good and evil

becomes shallow, flat, and soulless. We spoke of, and the Solzhenitsyn book, I've spoken of it in a million other places. The nature of the proletariat in the 19th century, people who were denuded of all of these things, their connection to the village, to the church, to nation, They were exposed very naively to things like gambling and prostitution for the first time. And they were deeply alienated as a result. This is exactly the sort of person who the Jewish Marxists would want to go after. Imposing this on people makes, for example, laborers in capitalist enterprise is very easy to control. On what grounds would you rebel if all of these things were gone?

usually, you know, nationalism. I mean, there's always economic problems, but economic problems, when connected to a nation, that's the foundation for rebellion. But if you eliminate all of this, or even the conception of right and wrong, then

on what basis do you rebel? There is no basis. And we see in America, it might be too late, but there is a certain revolt against this kind of thing. Everything we've talked about, you know, 20 years ago, of course, it all came true. South Africa, another great example. This is what happens.

People thinking that the black revolutionary was at the same moral level, the same intellectual level, as, you know, those running the apartheid state. And of course, they weren't. Everything we said was going to happen, happened. They don't really talk about it much anymore in what's going on in South Africa. You should talk about it constantly in the 80s. it's the same it's the same mentality what do they create what kind of person it's a cipher it's hard to even call them a people anymore that's a deep alienation i mean alienation is the only real word i could use for it um separation from everything that makes a normal person in the past

they're just ciphers now uh they can complain there's not much they can do about it all of this seems to be in the interest of capital. I'm not saying this is why, you know, they support it. But, you know, globalism can't exist unless these very institutions are destroyed. Cosmopolitanism is central to these ideologies. And it just so happens. It makes international trade much, much easier for the great multinational corporations. We talked about Karl Marx, an important.

doctrine of free trade has to exist prior to any revolution. Because free trade will destroy all local and national forms of identity. Only then can you even think about a communist revolution at that point. You can't talk about it with a strong sense of nation or, you know, an agrarian tradition or religion. So free trade meant a lot of things, it's to Mars. But it was something that was meant to destroy national borders and therefore national identities. Then you have these alienated proletarians, and those are the people who are going to create this revolution. It had nothing to do with their economic point of view, or the economic point of view.

Today, the left has abandoned that group entirely and now only deals with race and sexuality. But Marx, in its classical sense, saw the destruction of these institutions is absolutely necessary for it to come into power. and that's something that someone like Tolstoy or the anarchist will never understand. It looks like he's starting a new thought here, so I think we should end it right here. Yeah. Yeah, I think it read really well.

I'm very pleased, very proud of what I did here. This was good. I only saw one hiccup. Okay, okay. I wanted to also make sure that this is not Elyne speaking, this is Tolstoyan speaking. I want to make that very clear. We had the same problem with the Solzhenitsyn book, too.

I'd actually come out and say, no, this isn't him. He's actually citing the ideology of people he's opposed to. And so I make sure that we know that as well. All right. We'll be back on a couple days to continue this chapter. In the meantime, go over to the show notes, go over to the show notes, go over to the description in the video, donate to Dr. Johnson's work, subscribe to him on Patreon by his new book, by all of his books.

Yes, please. Show him support him. Show him some support. So that's it. Back in a couple days, and as always, thank you very much. I appreciate you. Thanks to you. I appreciate it very much.

Bye-bye. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of On Resistance to Evil by Force by Ivan Aline, Dr. Johnson, how goes it today? I'm in a pretty good mood. Temperature is down to 84, believe it or not. Still inhuman, but I could handle it. For our listeners, if they haven't checked out the Hegel stuff, I'm doing with Thomas, please do.

We're having a great time with that. I guarantee you, I guarantee you, this is the best time anyone's had dealing with Hegel ever. in the history of intellectual life. I have to agree. I have to agree. And the constant trying to pull it into real life examples. I hope people are following that.

That that's exactly what's going on there. Yeah, at least reading. Now, I did upload a new version of my, what does Hegel mean by Dialectics paper? I was dissatisfied with the first one when I reread it. It was a little sloppy. So I redid it. And there I make fun of a lot of the, you know, patriot conservatives who pretend that they know something about Hegel and talk about his dialectics in a way that proves that they have no conception of what they're talking about.

The Syracquel Schopenhauer's out there. And so that's at least that is a worthy something something. to look at. Something to read. Yep, I already uploaded it. Thank you. All righty. Picking up where we left off last time. Here we go. Compare the following formula of spiritual nihilistic utilitarianism, worthy of any consistent materialist and entirely following from sentimental hedonism. Quote, in this one manner, in the struggle with nature, man receives, if we separate it, complete satisfaction of the physical and spiritual demands of his nature. nature. To feed, clothe, and take care of oneself and one's loved ones is the satisfaction of a

physical need. To do the same for other people is a satisfaction of a spiritual need." If we grasp this point of view and trust it, it turns out that man is not an individual spirit with a living relationship to the living and personal God, with sacred rights to participate in the life of the God-created world, with a vision of insensible mystery and sensual beauty with the study of the law and the knowledge of wisdom. No, all this is rejected and extinguished. Man is, on the one hand, a suffering subject and therefore an object of pity and compassion. On the other hand, he is a pitying subject and, accordingly, an object protected from suffering. The entire life of humanity boils down to people's suffering and causing each other's suffering,

that people sometimes pity each other and sometimes do not. You know, this could have been written yesterday, and it would have had the same, it would have been equally relevant. The notion of offense, someone being offended. When I was in grad school, I had a guy, he should not have been a grad student. He did drop out. He told me that my views were not compassionate. And I said, views can't be compassionate or not compassionate. They're either true or they're false.

I don't know what the hell you're talking about here. I mean, he was a very, very likable guy, jolly fat guy. But he dropped down. He didn't have that mentality. Speaking like that, proves that he didn't have that mentality. He did cause some of the professors a lot of trouble. So I had a soft spot my heart for him. But this is, and, you know, keep in mind something.

And we were just talking about that before. came on the air that his commentators know that Tolstoy was an atheist. He completely rejected. He used the language of God in the New Testament just to be able to reach your typical

Russian of the day. But he rejected the supernatural entirely. It's sort of like Jim Jones. In his letters, Jim Jones letters to North Korea and China, trying to get out of Guyana, him. He says that, no, I'm a full materialist and hence an atheist. I only use this God stuff just for the sake of, you know, building a movement. It was no different than Tolstoy.

He, and he wrote something that I hadn't looked at in a very long time on the Russo-Japanese War when it, and even when, well, you know, it would have been, I'm a place. to the rules of Japanese War. And since even if you're attacked, responding still is illegitimate, no matter how many people are killed. And when he was questioned on this kind of thing, he says,

since you can't look into the future and see how that's going to be either successful or not, there's no reason to do it. In other words, there's no reason to reply. Which I think is a very weak argument. The other thing he does a lot in that article is he makes the arguments of his opponents for us.

And of course, they're all straw men. And so he answers his own version of what people like us might say, or Eileen might say. And then answers those. So typical, you know, typical leftism. I mean, you know, Tolstoy was right in the agrarian life he was dead right on. in many ways. In fact, he should be read in that regard. His anti-modernist stuff is excellent, too.

For traditionalists, whether Catholic and Orthodox, but he ruins it with this kind of nonsense. And the fact that there really is no creator ruins it even further. The highest goal of humanity is to pity and not to torment. The highest perfection accessible to man, is reduced to all-encompassing compassion to pity everyone with one's whole soul. Righteous action consists of protecting everyone from suffering, even at the cost of one's own suffering and one's own life.

Beyond this, the sentimental moralist sees, demonstrates, and teaches. He rejects and ridicules everything else. Ultimately, this point of view is condescending. You see it today. The left often speaks for the alleged victims of our words. I recall when the Washington Redskins took their, changed their logo on their helmet, which was drawn by an Indian, by the way. No American Indian tribe had any problem with it.

It was all white liberals, mostly women, you know, berating the organization to do that. there was nothing wrong with it. It showed a very strong-looking warrior on there. But the Indian tribes, you know, so-called native to the area, they had no problem with it. So these women that were berating the, you know, the Redskine organization, you know, they were claiming to be protecting the Indians from being offended. it didn't matter that they weren't. You know, and this is really what he's talking about here. It's almost, it's very condescending compassion.

And they really think that they've done something wonderful. And I've come across this in many debates. The white liberal woman will speak for the non-white, whoever you're talking about. and make straw man arguments and everything else. And for some reason, the red-skinned thing just came into my mind, because that's really what he's talking about here. It is precisely in this that the limitations and simplifications of his understanding of life are revealed with complete clarity.

His sentimentality, this heightened and acute but objectless and weak-willed sensitivity, responds extremely easily, quickly, and sharply to any human dissatisfaction, to any suffering of others. It is wounded by it. Shudders, is horrified, and begins to weakly dream of its elimination, of its cessation, of its end. And all life's wisdom boils down to this. Suffering is evil. That is the first hidden axiom. I'm personally, I'm an empath. I've always been. I'm extremely sensitive to the suffering and pains of others. Whether it be animals, whether it be humans, whether it be anybody. and yet I don't translate it into Tolstoy's point of view because he says here the sentimentality and you notice and I kind of struggled in putting this together

so I settled on the term objectless in other words it's his generalized sensitivity whereas for a goodie an empath like myself it actually has an object It may have a person as a thing, as an ethnic group, as a family. There is an object to it here. It's just being as such. But ultimately that's exposed to be the same thing as nothing. You can't love everything.

You can't love everyone. You can't be sensitive to everything and everyone. And for the most part, they're not sensitive to our suffering. That's for damn sure. So, of course, there's always exceptions to this. But yes, and it's not really a hidden axiom. It's out in the open. Suffering is evil unless it happens to us.

This wisdom from which all else is derived, if suffering is evil, then causing suffering is also evil. Conversely, the absence of suffering is good, and sympathy for the suffering of others is a virtue. This determines the fate of our main purpose. problem. In the struggle against suffering, is it permissible to inflict new suffering, multiplying and complicating its overall volume and composition? Quote, Satan cannot cast out by Satan. Untruth cannot be cleansed by untruth. Evil cannot be

conquered by evil, end quote. And this answer is only consistent. If suffering truly is evil, then who would agree to increase its volume while striving to decrease it? Or, who would agree to enter the path of the devil in order not to enter it. Thus, the fundamental principle of sentimental morality is revealed. It rests on hedonism. Let me give an example. Another example here that we've used before. You walk into a room and there's a man assaulting a child.

The theory, as it's laid out in this paragraph, would be in attacking the guy that's hurting a child, you're now increasing suffering. It's not just that the little kid is suffering, but now the adult is suffering, and you're suffering too, maybe. He's probably going to be a fight. Therefore, intervention here physically is out of the question. And you notice how quite often Tolstoy keeps it in the abstract,

other than, you know, he'll never use an example like I've used, because he'd have zero followers at that point. So certainly, you know, if I punch someone in the back of the head who's doing that, I might break a lot of the bones in my fists. Remember, you punch something. You always use this forward. Never use like, like Clint Eastwood. You break every bone in your hand.

Not only that's suffering, but the guy I hit his sufferings. Now you have three suffering people. You don't know if that's even going to fix the problem. hence you should intervene. That's the nature of the objection to intervening in that very extreme example. And it says it right here. Despite all this, in reality, man, with his nature, his drives, his abilities, and his tasks, is constructed in such a way that the easiest thing for him is a satisfaction of his needs and pleasures, while, and the hardest thing for him is the will to spiritual perfection, the efforts to lead to it and its attainment.

Man is always drawn downward toward pleasure and especially towards sensual pleasures and rarely is drawn upward, toward the perfect, toward its vision and creation. The path upward is revealed to man and granted to him, but it is granted only through suffering. For the essence of suffering consists primarily in the fact that the downward to lower pleasures is closed and inaccessible to men. This closure of the lower path does not necessarily signify spiritual attainment, but is the first and fundamental condition of assent.

This is Ilin speaking here now. He's done with Tolstoy. And I think it's very clear. It's also extremely profound. Anything worth having you have to suffer for. Giving birth is the most extreme example. But, you know, even education, you know, you struggle to get.

through, you know, you're studying, you're doing, you're sacrificing time and a lot of money. Anything that happens, anything good that you've become has occurred through suffering. In other words, to say that suffering is a bad thing is idiotic, but only certain types of suffering. And we've mentioned this on this show, maybe even on the Hangel show before. I look back my real dark times over the decades, and I almost have a sentimental point of view towards it, a nostalgic point of view I should use, is I know that what I've become is the result of those brutal times. Brutal times are times when you are forced to sit down and say, who am I, and what do I want to be? there are people usually attractive women who don't really know what suffering is they never have to ask themselves that

you're the princess types they're treated as princesses from babyhood through to adulthood they're hot enough what sort of personality is that going to create suffering is exactly what's necessary unfortunately for us to ask the deep and hard questions and of course he's going to give acceptance

obviously in the next paragraph, but this is a very profound statement here. Not every form of suffering elevates, for it requires a certain true direction of the suffering soul and a certain inner skill, but every genuine spiritual movement and achievement grows out of suffering, whether ancient or new, briefly profound or long-lasting, forgotten or unforgettable. Only that part, only that strength of the soul, which has not found pleasure and peace and primordial earthly activities ascends to God. Only that part that has not outlived itself in human satisfactions, which did not rejoice in them but suffered and was ashamed and terrified at their approach.

Suffering is the price of spirituality and the limit of our animal natures. It is the limit to the careless pleasure-seeking that entices all men. It is the source of will and spirit, the beginning of purification and vision, the foundation of character and wisdom. So it's not just any old suffering. It's suffering that we have to go through to reach a goal. You know, my father used to say, you know, he went to Paris Island in 1950. It was brutal.

I don't know if I used this example before. But he used to say, you know, those guys, did they do that because they hated me? No, they did it so I would survive. I'd be a Marine, a good Marine. and that is partially why he he made it through. If you only look at them, you know, beating someone up, you say, my God, what's wrong with them? They're sadistic.

Then you understand that there's a reason behind it. There's a mentality behind it. And that's sentimental, very effeminate, you know, revolting from that kind of thing is, I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Whiplash. No, I'm not saying that the physical violence was justified. Yeah, I've seen it. But for the most part, for the most part, Fletcher was correct.

Greatness doesn't come from indulgence. And if you can't handle it, you're not going to be able to handle the music business. So we could say this about anything. Discipline requires this cut. Now, again, when he beat the kid up that, you know, he can go to hell. But he did it very well. What an actor he is. Simmons, J.K. Simmons, or J.R. Simmons, whatever his name is.

but that was his theory. Now, he was able to justify pretty much anything he did there, and it doesn't, but he was correct in the abstract that, you know, a teacher is never your friend. A teacher, a true master in something, whatever you want to do, bringing you out of the earthly pleasure-seeking into something else.

They aren't your friend. Friends don't want you to suffer. you're suffering for a very not doing it because they hate you they're doing because this is the nature of warfare or this is the nature of the music business or this is the nature of elevating the soul you know asceticism is painful it sucks a lot of the time um but there's a reason for it you know it's so easy to go downward as he says here you know because of our fallen nature's if we just don't do we just, you know, collapse into just basic utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism is just what happens when you have nothing else. It's not profound, it's not interesting, it's just pleasure upon pleasure, which, of course, in the long term, isn't pleasurable at all. It's the maintenance of discipline that takes constant effort and constant vigilance. And I just wonder with the present young, generation if that's plausible anymore, but it's a simple fact. So if this short-term

utilitarianism mentality, the Tolstoyans is correct, then, you know, it's really, it comes down to the ideology of your suburban liberal woman who's out there in the, you know, immigrants welcome, refusing to believe any other, you know, rape issue or anything else. Immigrants welcome because it is 90% women in these demonstrations in Europe and elsewhere. That's the mentality that he is laying out here. It's as relevant when he wrote this as it is yesterday. Therefore, life's wisdom consists not in fleeing suffering as an evil, but in accepting it as a gift and a pledge,

in using it and drawing inspiration from it. This acceptance must be made not only for oneself, but also for others. It does not mean that one will deliberately torment oneself and others. Rather, it means that one will overcome one's fear of suffering, cease to see it as an evil, and will not strive to end it at any cost. Moreover, one will find the resolve and strength to inflict suffering on oneself and one's neighbor to the extent of a higher spiritual necessity, taking care that this suffering does not damage the power of spiritual clarity and spiritual love within oneself. For the spirit is greater than the soul, is the price of the spiritual life?

I don't think there is a lot of evidence that people pursue their own self-interest very well. I don't think most people are rational in 26. Self-destruction seems to be more and more the norm. In that case, it's suffering for nothing. If you follow the short-term idea that Eileen is talking about here, you'll die young. Because you won't be disciplined in your diet. Even something as simple as that. It's not our fault that we're born into a world where we have to exercise to burn off our excess calories.

That's not our fault. Those are the expectations we were raised with, but we have to deal with it. And that means that even more discipline, again, my example of being forced to work in a bar, that's how it is. That's how it is for young men, especially young men out there. And any, you know, pastor has to be, has to keep that in mind. That's what it's like. And also keep in mind that when you fall in that environment, God fully understands and will bring you back up again. It isn't, you know, and yet we have to deal with people who have no

standards, quoting us hypocrites for not being able to reach our very high standard. And that drives me insane. It was before this tragic law of human existence that the sentimental moralist stopped, shuddered, and did not accept it. He did not accept such. He denounced the price of spiritual life and closed his eyes to the fundamental tragedy of man. He experienced suffering as evil and rejected it. In line with this rejection, he began to seek a path to inner pleasure and found it in the rapture of pity. He began to pity everyone who suffers and posited as the highest goal, the non-infliction of suffering on others. Further, he rejected not only the path of suffering, but also the very goal of suffering assent. His sentimentality poured out into hedonism and led him to materialism.

The entire spiritual treasury, all of humanity's spiritual endeavors, were condemned and rejected so that man would not suffer and offend each other for the sake of a single supreme achievement, the universal enjoyment of universal mutual pity. In my opinion, this began at the Reformation. This began when the ascetic life was laughed at by the more radical reformer. And things like fasting were completely rejected. Now we're in a society that stuffs themselves. the secular argument for fasting is irrefutable.

And yet I think it goes back to the Reformation. Nominalism, liberalism, these things in one way or another go back to the rejection of this structured life, leading eventually to this sentimental hedonism. And the stupid argument that I can't handle anymore when people say, you know, I don't believe God exists because of all the suffering and the innocent suffering in the world. And they may point to some terrible event and everything. And I say, well, why stop there? You're saying you want God to create a world where there is no suffering, there is no pain whatsoever. And, you know, they don't really know what to say. I said, well, then

there's also no freedom. There's also no purpose there. Now, Adam and Eve weren't perfect. They were innocent. they were like children. And, you know, I mean, even something along the lines of having kids, there's a lot of pain in that. There's a lot of work and there's a lot of struggle. And you do things not because you dislike your kids, but because we know what they're going to be going into very soon. Thank God Almighty, I was successful.

I had two boys. I don't know guys with daughters. I have no idea what the hell is going on there. but you know and but you know this is something I thought out I followed my own father's idea there's suffering there there's pain there and on both sides and the only reason that happens is because you were trying to create a personality that will go out into the world and to be able to handle the evil that surrounds them and and thank God and I give it to you God is one who allowed me to be successful in that respect.

Other men or not, whether it's their fault or not, is a different story. All these things that even things we consider good contain suffering all over the place. This sentimental hedonism teaches that there is nothing higher in this world for which people should suffer themselves and impose suffering on their neighbors. The entire task is for everyone to internally transform their suffering into compassion and thereby pave the way to highest pleasure. There is nowhere and no point in going higher than this. This cannot be achieved by force, and therefore violence, as a needless multiplication of human suffering, is unconditionally condemned. But this also means that spiritual nihilism is a product of sentimental hedonism.

The doctrine of nonviolent resistance to evil is a consistent conclusion from both. Now, use the example of walking into a room and seeing that horrible situation. If you accept Tolstoy, you can't violently intervene. You can go as he's doing something awful and maybe read from the Psalms, you know, or something equally ridiculous under those circumstances. But over time, if you maintain that mentality over time, you will soon, see what that guy is doing as not problematic except that it causes suffering in the child. And maybe it's not problematic at all.

So you don't have to intervene. His whole argument is that you don't know what's going to happen when you intervene. It could make suffering a million times worse. So let's say you find a father somewhere and you beat the crap out of him. And you say it's because of what you do to your kid. And he may go home and make the kid suffering even. million times worth. That is a point. But he makes that a generalized point. You have no idea what your actions are going to do in the future. Therefore, you don't do anything,

which of course is a non-secretory. But over time, you have people, especially if the guy beating his kids is, you know, of a certain race, you start to make excuses. Maybe there's a cultural reason for this beating. Maybe, you know, and you start making these ridiculous, very effeminate excuses for them, over time, maybe that doesn't seem so bad. Maybe it's not suffering at all. And therefore, you really have no right to intervene, that you eventually end up with this spiritual nihilism that seems to, maybe not logically, but at least, you know, practically follows from this mentality. All this can be expressed this way. Tolstoy's morality sees an element of love and the idea of goodness and fails to recognize the element of spirit.

Therefore, it affirms as the highest value a love that is non-spiritual and even antisperiritual, which turns out to be weak-willed, sentimental pity, and drags down all the higher values of life to the level of elementary, instinctive mediocrity. Accordingly, in Tolstoy's morality, he sees an element of hatred in the idea of evil and fails to recognize the element of anti-spirituality. Therefore, it sees the gravest sin in hostility or its outward manifestations, condemns a spiritually correct separation of good from the good from the evil and fails to notice what it's what it's what it itself includes in its ideal well obviously these men didn't live to

see the vietnam war suddenly you had you know from 68 to 73 roughly you saw this massive increase in pacifism especially among young people who were subject to the draft and the U.S. which is of sure it's just a coincidence. Now, their pacifism was, of course, utter nonsense because they were

also violent when they fought the cops and everything else. The hippies are, to this day, no, how many bombs that group, you know, the left in the 60s planted. I think it's like 5,000 now total. They're still being

promoted as this resurrection of legitimate pacifism and lovers of peace. and it weren't lovers of peace. They didn't want to get drafted. So many of the demonstrations disappeared after the draft was ended in 1973. When Congress cut off aid to South Vietnam, they were aware of what the North was going to do. Now, the South Vietnamese army, contrary, I know the whole topic, but I don't care,

was some of the bravest and toughest in Asian history. they fought right to the end, contrary to the mythology about them. Most of the casualties in the war, in fact, occurred in the last three years, three, four years. They fought right to the end, sometimes with no ammunition. They were aware of what would happen when aid was, they eventually became dependent on American assistance, ammunition and everything else. But I suppose you would have no choice in that case. case that either just to lie to yourself and even lying to yourself will lead to this idea

that there really is no evil. Or that this suffering that they're doing is for a good cause because the left is doing it. I published a paper. I actually put it on my Patreon, but I talk about it quite a bit about North Vietnamese policy to South Vietnam. And it was a slaughter. So you have eyewitness You have so many

You know Their own writings in the north They're very clear of what they're going to do They even had quotas in some cases So the passive is hippies You know you couldn't talk to them about this To this day I guess they're in their 70s now

The boomers you can't talk to them about this Many of them eventually did turn on North Vietnam Like Joan Baez She came across something and oh my god i can't believe i supported this government but you did as always our people were right and their people were wrong they had this sentimental very effeminate view of the north you know nomchonsky uh supported both north vietnam and the kimir ruse quite a bit actually to

to a great degree uh intellectually and personal and so isn't it convenient that over time you start to refuse to even make a distinction between good and evil. Or what we would consider evil, they'll either cover it up or say it's really for the good. And always keep in mind that when we suffer, it's not a problem. It's only everyone else. The hallmark of inherent evil is anti-spirituality.

Consequently, the entire doctrine of good and evil is distorted and invalidated. Goodness is presented in a shallow and trivial form. hedonist and self-sufficient, spiritually dead, and sentimentally idyllic. Evil is presented in a comparatively harmless form, external violence, easily overcome, devoid of its essential toxicity, and at the same time evoking in the moralist in an inappropriately exaggerated, affected indignation. The entire distinction between good and evil turns out to be incorrect.

Act. Spiritually nihilistic, sentimentally vulgar, weak-willed, and spiritually irresponsible moods and actions are considered virtuous. On the contrary, heroic, strong-willed, prophetically angry deeds that suppress evil and punished a villain are considered among the most shameful and base manifestations of man. And above all, this reigns the straightforwardness of reason and the naivete of the reasoning layman. You know how difficult this was to translate? I didn't see that. The, I mean, you know, the machine did, did okay, but it certainly didn't say this. And it was, it was an absolute struggle.

And I'm 90% sure I got the, I did it. I think this is coherent. I think it does make sense. Now, apart from the arguments that the Tolstoyan type would make, I'm not so sure that you can consistently be like. like this. Again, when we suffer, it's not a problem. These moods only tend to arise when the left is a target, let's say, of military action. But, you know, where is the anti-war movement now that America's opponents have been, roughly speaking, right-wing, either, you know, nationalist, nationalists, nationalists, or religious nationalists? Nowhere to be. To be

found. There were huge demonstrations against the motion movement of nuclear weapons into Germany in the early 80s. Today, nuclear weapons are being moved all over, even to Finland, and no problem. There may be small demonstrations, nothing like that. Media aren't going to talk about it. These things seem to develop depending on who the victim is. The anti-war movement was the creation of the regime. Or else it would exist now. I mean, you have the worst, the Vietnam War, there was a specific goal, you know, to keep the North out of South Vietnam. America's wars in the last 25 years have no goal. And it just led to tens of millions being killed.

I'm not seeing these huge, massive demonstrations. There's no woodstock out there condemning this kind of thing. So the point being is that, you know, I tend to think that the adoption of this kind of ideology exists relative to the target. If we were at war with the leftist government somewhere, matter how evil they might be, you'll see anti-war movement, you'll see hippies, you'll see all that. But if the target is, let's say, the government in El Salvador in the 80s or even today, there'll be nothing. I'm sorry, they'll be absolutely, yeah,

there'll be absolutely nothing or an absolute minimal. You won't see these massive demonstrations anymore. So it's not just that they eliminate the concept of good and evil. They become so fluid that they apply it wherever their ideological

interest fit. It's evil when the January 6th, six guys, it's not evil on the January 6th guys suffer. But when Antifa suffers, it's evil. And terrible, it needs to stop. And I think, you know, most groups, organizations that believe this kind of thing, people that believe this kind of thing, I think you almost have, it's very rare that you find a totally consistent pacifist point of view in the way to Tolstoy is being explained here.

Naturally, with the rejection of the spirit and the decisive preference for a soul without a soul, one that pities and indulges in pleasure, everything in life is displaced and devalued. That for which man deserves to live on earth and suffers falls away, and that which remains and strives to take the place of what has fallen away turns out to not be worth the suffering and dying for. Indeed, the spiritual principle in man is the instrument of divine revelation. It gives man something for which to live. something worth educating himself and others, something worth bearing suffering and lifting burdens.

Here is a treasure worth living for and worth dying for. It gives meaning to life, suffering, and death. The sacredness is not only greater than the individual, greater than personal morality and personal enjoyment. It is greater than any collection of people who have rejected it and set themselves in opposition to it. For by it, this sacredness is defined what is essential, real, and sacred in man, in a nation, and in humanity.

The Greek word abulia. I first came across it in something that Michael Hoffman had had written many, many years ago. And it means like a generalized lethargy, but more specifically, it means this lethargy

exists because there's nothing worth fighting for. It's very much, you know, a Gen Z kind of mentality. that this conception of a lack of refusing to distinguish good and evil is just that a laziness more than anything else. A bulia is a great, I use it all the time, and I think it's very common in Western populations because it's not just, it's not laziness, it's lethargy,

but a lethargy that exists because they're convinced that there's nothing worth being energetic about. There's nothing worth dying for. I always laugh when I, you know, if the U.S. were to institute the draft tomorrow, I think maybe, what was it, 15% according to Newsweek, 15% of the young men in this country could be drafted. even less than that because everyone else either has, you know, mental illnesses or overweight. Obviously, there wasn't the case in 1968. But even if the draft were instituted, there's no one to draft. And A Bulia has a lot to do with this.

This mentality is imposed and it was imposed. And when it exists and is enforced over time, it creates a bulia. And a bully, thank God, I don't have it, you don't have it. Thank God my kids didn't have it. But those afflicted by it live miserable and meaningless lives. And I feel bad for them. With the apostasy of this sacred thing, everything is reduced to a multitude of individuals, sometimes indulging in mutual insults and violence, sometimes enjoying mutual compassion.

They are all equal moral atoms, and among them there are no servants or organs of the sacred thing, responsible to it, authorized by it, representing it, dying and punishing for it. There is no church, the keeper of revelation, no homeland, the living treasury of the spirit, no wisdom, and national assent to it. No beauty, no heroism, no honor, and their living tradition. Crude and vulgar violence is seen where, in fact, the living mystery of political unity is being worked out. Can you imagine living that way? I mean, now he's gone a little bit past Tolstoy here, and he's talking about now what we would call liberalism, more generally speaking,

concept of social atomism, or individualism. The individual owes nothing to anybody. He exists, you know, in and of himself, you know, the Hobbesian idea. And one atom is equal to any other realm. and you know Hobbs is the creator of the modern world intellectually speaking i believe in renaissance britain and he was unbelievably corrosive and of course was anomalous and everything else but i would say i don't know i don't know if you would agree with me but the percentage of the typical american the percentage of american males who live this way would be

more than a majority maybe. No church, no homeland, no, no, no, you know, there's nothing to discipline yourself for. No heroism. No honor. God knows no, no national idea. And when they see it in others, they're terrified of it. You know, the ethnic churches that I used to go to and I would bring people there. They would say stupid things like, oh my God, they worship Ukraine or they worshiped Serbia. what are you talking about? Yeah, there's a flag there and they used the language.

But they were so put off by the idea of an ethnic church that they didn't really know what to do with it. They were terrified by it. And it actually was a quite moderate, you know, idea. Ethnic churches are, you know, the hallmark of orthodoxy for the most part. And it's been a very good, very good idea. And so when there's kind of like throwing someone who's free, into a bath of hot water.

They just go into connoisseons. And I don't know, do you think a majority of American males live this way? I think a majority of Americans live this way. You know, one of the things that I say all the time is that there are no good denominations. There are only good churches, like individual churches. Parishes. Yeah, parishes. Anybody who's been to multiple denominations knows that this is right.

So that means that basically you're looking at the majority of churches in every denomination are basically lost. So that's or are not following apostolic teaching. So when you take that into consideration that even the churches themselves, the majority of people who don't go to church and then probably the majority of people who are in church is it's the overwhelming majority of the population.

I think, so you said overwhelming majority of the population. This is a, it's a terrifying idea. And it would explain depression. It would explain this generalized anxiety. It would explain obesity. It would explain all of the, why wouldn't they be obese? You know, they really,

they have no conception of discipline. You've looked at my 600-pound life. They don't know what discipline is. You know, and this is a terrifying idea that we're surrounded by this. And we are looked at with great suspicion because we don't live that way. And we're quite happy to suffer for, as we both have. I certainly have. But no wisdom, no beauty, no honor.

This is just, it's not a human life. I think my cats live a far more purpose-filled. life than they do. They actually have a purpose being animal. I think these people are even lower than that. It's a terrifying concept, a reality, I should say. Men have no reason to coerce and educate each other, so we're told. Man feels only his personal insult and the desire for revenge, and his task is reduced to not taking revenge, but to forgive and pity. If he succeeds in loving those who have offended him and offending no one else, then his life's task is accomplished. The sentimental moralist fails to see that he has spiritually devastated the human soul

and pledged it into a state of blindness and vulgarity. He fails to understand that man is significant only to the extent of his spirituality and that to the extent of his lack of spirituality and anti-spirituality, man is blind and vulgar. He fails to see that a spiritually empty soul, turning away and mocking, becomes a religiously monstrous phenomenon, deserving not of tender pity, but of anger and sobriety. He fails to understand that the vulgarity of others is no better than my own, and in no way deserves love, support, or sacrifice, that altruism does not consist in serving the vulgarity of others simply because it is foreign. That love for one's neighbor is love for his spirit and his soul, and not simply pity for

his suffering flesh. He preaches love and does not notice that he is degrading and stripping this great principle, separating it from spirituality. Yeah, the word vulgar, and I use it a lot in all. I think most Arab European languages, it comes from the same root as common. It's the opposite of aristocratic, but the true mark of an aristocratic man is the willingness to suffer and die for a very good cause. Um, so, um, uh, I put the so we're told up there to, you know, you, this isn't, this isn't, this isn't, you Lynn talking about himself by any means. Um, this is an extended description of what the Tolstoyan idea leads to, mentally speaking. Um, you know, there's a personal insult. Uh, if he doesn't

take revenge, he's done something wonderful. Okay. I have no problem with that. But then that's, of course, generalized to everybody. I've come to hate the words, everybody, and all. Because in the ancient world, phrases like that, terms like that, didn't really exist. Parts because there was no conception of zero, you know, practically speaking, that came from India. later on,

but every and all would be the same as nothing. It's mass society. Yet you could say God loves all men. What does that mean? In the Old Testament, that means either their total destruction or their reward for moral action, including taking part in that destruction. This is why Tulsa,

has no difficulty in just using a few lines in the Old Testament. He's materialist. He's pretty much, he's an atheist, generally speaking, using religious terms just to reach his own peasants and the peasants and other people in Russia, who in his lifetime, you know, literacy was quite high. There was certain, you know, old school peasants who didn't, had no reason to read, but had tremendous memories. So this is

the notion of the lack of revenge. We're not talking about revenge here. We're talking about justice. Two very different things. On the personal level, especially if they're a member of the church, we have to calm down. We have to apologize, even if it's not our fault.

But when you generalize that, as Tolstoy demands that we do, then insult or attack, even to something like Virgin Mary or the nation, everything else, that also receives absolutely no response. And, you know, it's like, his argument that we simply don't know

what's going to come with this. He assumes that it's just going to lead to more violence and more hatred. Of course, we don't know that. we could use his own language against them. I give money to the poor, even if they are going to use it on something terrible, I don't care.

That's my obligation. Christ said I go to hell of it, unless I do that. You know, unless you're fraudulent or something like that. But the concept of vulgar comes up a lot here, and essentially is, I want to say, something like mass society. Because its root comes from the common, in a bad sense, you know, common in the sense of not mattering. The aristocrat, you know, the aristocracy, I know in all Russia, there was really no class. They didn't have, or Byzantium didn't have actually specific classes.

Like you had in the West so much. But the old boyar class, they were expected, they were mostly military men. and if they died they died and in return the peasants would serve him and they would have certain honors and everything else for the most part they were as poor as their peasants were

but you know that's what a true aristocrat is the opposition to that is the vulgar and that's what comes from Tolstoy's philosophy now we all know that Christ commanded what he did for the sake of our personal

someone, again, especially if they're a member of the church, insults us, you let it go on a strictly personal level. That's hard to do. But when you told the story, this sentiment, this objectless sentimentality, which has been the issue here, says now that should be applied to everyone and everything, those awful words, because everyone and everything is equal to you. and in practical terms that simply isn't true. The aristocrat and the vulgar are very, very different people. Yeah, I was looking it up while you, I took Latin. So vulgar basically meant common. The original Latin term was vulgaris, well, not the original,

which meant of the common people are ordinary, and that derived from vulgus, which was the masses. it evolved from describing basically a common people to basically if you use it as saying like something is crude, offensive or in poor taste, you're basically using vulgar as slang officially. Exactly, yeah. And it shouldn't be used that way, but I get it. That's not how he's using it here. He's using it in his true sense here, I think. For the love of the sentimental and anti-spiritual hedonist does not come from the spirit and does not go to the spirit.

It does not place itself or the presence of the beloved before the face of God. This is not a divine encounter, a shared experience and vision of him, mutual teaching, encouragement, education, inspiration, and the unification of the two spiritual passions. No, this is mutual relaxation and mutual animal pity. This is the weak-willed indulgence of a sentimental person, most of all afraid of causing unpleasantness to his neighbor. This is a spineless sweet sympathy pouring out equally on the meek and the wicked and harming both. Such anti-spiritual compassion is unworthy of man, his spirit, and his calling. For love is humiliating for both and beloved and the lover, unless it is, for all its joyful tenderness, a spiritual will for the spiritual perfection of the beloved.

This is a meaning and these are the consequences of sentimental nihilism, put forward by Tolstoy and his followers as the only saving moral revelation. Yeah, again, I have, my God, he's repetitive, because he said this about 20 times now. But I think there's a reason he said it 20 times. This is something extremely profound, and it's worth repeating. Um, this is the mentality of someone who thinks that a Christian is this guy, you know, a Christian man, uh, you know, kind of has his hands like this. You know, he tilts his head to the side, maybe a little bit. Um, it just, you know, tolerates everything. Um, you know, this, this view that Christ was this, this, this, um, hippie who was against war and everything. And it comes from this mentality. It comes from these people reading their weakness back into history.

And it's blasphemy to do something like this. No, Holy Men did not. Some of them may have under certain circumstances. But for the most part, Holy Men, we're not like that. Read the writings of the prophet Amos. One of my favorite. Amos and Joel. No, they weren't like that.

For Jeremiah, for that matter. Love required them, and it was only love, required them to harshly condemn Israel for its evil, for its stupidity, for its laziness. That's what love required. If he didn't act like that, it wouldn't be a loving encounter. This is why the word love, and I deal with so many, the manipulation of words over the decades where you have,

I still think the majority of the positive, population would say that love is, you know, to love your neighbor is to not harm them in any way. Well, that might be technically true, but they'll go on to say that it means not to hurt him in any way. No, sometimes pain is a good thing. Everyone, you know, every once in a while you say, boy, that guy deserves a good beating. Because on occasion, that beating might be the only thing that will change his mind on something. You won't harm that kid anymore because he knows if people out there watching, they're going to beat the cramp out of him again. You know, in that case, the suffering has been ended.

And the only reason you do it, I mean, for the most part, we do it because we hate the guy. You know, that's true. But we should be doing it for love of the young man, of his victim. But also, in a way, as Socrates would say, you know, we're doing it for the benefit of the person who's being beaten up. He doesn't, you know, that guy deserves a beating. No, I'm sorry. That guy needs a beating.

You hear that all the time, and it means that if he received one, he would be a different person. You'd be a better person. And I think I take that line very seriously in the past. And it's not a call for generalized violence by any means, but under very specific circumstances in personal life, you come across someone who needs a very harsh and abrupt way of dealing with him strictly out of love for his,

it's for his benefit. He's never heard no before. And hearing it the first time, he's got to be like nails on a talk board, but, you know, that comes straight from love. I'm not talking about violence here, really, in reality. But, you know, the simple no.

And the sentimental moralist tough time saying no. It's a very effeminate lack of will, as he says here. Classic abulia doesn't come from love whatsoever. It comes from the fact that there's nothing worth fighting for. There's nothing worth, you know, dying for out there. Nothing. It's all that's left is my animal passions. Even that could be a problem. So I think Ilin, although he's quite repetitive here, I think he's driven the point home. And I knew that this part of the book is going to make sense out of all the previous,

you know, more theoretical arguments. Now we're getting to the meat of the matter. This is why he said all that stuff. Be very careful when someone says that they, they, they, their actions are based on love. Be careful. It doesn't mean just generalized indulgence. It could never mean generalized indulgence.

We live in a fallen world. So, yeah, he's repetitive, but I think he needs to be. All righty. I will ask everyone to go over to the show notes and go over to the description in the video and donate to Dr. Johnson's work. Thank him for what he's doing here. I mean, five bucks a month is worth

Just for the translation on this, this is crazy. Oh, yeah, this is definitely, it's a labor of love, of course. It's probably good for me, but this is one of the examples of where suffering is a general positive thing. It is unpleasant. But it needs to be done. And, you know, my translation skills aren't all that great. I always need help. It used to be my dictionaries.

Now it's Yendex translation. or whatever. But that can't be trusted entirely. So you have to know some things. And either way, it's a huge amount of work. And I'm still getting medical bills. I'm still getting bills in the mail.

I can't believe it. From all my time in the hospital, I don't even know what these people are talking about half the time. So yes, please. I ask humbly to assist me in this regard. And you're, as I said before, your audience is very generous, and I truly appreciate them. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of Unresistance to Evil by Force by Ivan

Eileen. Dr. Johnson, what's happening today? One of the things my wife and I still do, in fact, we did when we first met especially, is I sent her songs. She likes that, especially when we first met. and the first song I sent, you know, she's expecting a love song or something like that. Now, I sent her seven days by Sting with a lecture about time signatures and how Vinnie Calli Yuda was able to make a 5-4 time signature sound like 4-4. And after that, it was Weather Report. And then Pat Metheny.

Oh, and then Russia's chemistry, which is actually about chemistry. And she thought that was the coolest thing. You know, I would actually lecture her on different things. The difference between major and minor keys and stuff like that. She said, this is my man. Not the idiot that's going to send, you know, love songs right away. He's going to lecture me on time signatures. Very important to her, apparently.

Yeah, I don't think my wife would have had the same. same reaction. Say feel sexual. That's how it is. All righty. We're starting a new chapter here. And the chapter 12 with a title that is about the world rejecting religion. Now, is that world rejecting religion or is that about the world rejecting a religion?

Because it looks like world rejecting religion. Yeah. There's a, there's a dash. in the original. Okay. All right. So, yeah, I immediately pick up on where this is going. Yeah.

All right. Here we go. One of the most significant consequences of this entire moral nihilistic stance is peculiar practical rejection of the world that serves as the last and most reliable refuge and protection for the non-resisting. This rejection of the external world apparently stems from more. moral grounds, but in reality it is rooted in a vague and confused religious conception of the external world. The moralist, as has already been established, leads a life turned in upon himself,

and as a result he finds himself turned away from everything that is not his own soul with its sometimes sinful, sometimes virtuous pleasures. It is clear that the entire world recedes into the background and fades in its reality. Having in its inner world, the supreme and only value is virtuous pity and pitying pleasure. The moral soul does not appreciate or cultivate the centrifugal bias of life. It finds it difficult to break free from its attitude and turn to the external. And if it is forced to take something external, it agrees to it only insofar as this material is touching, sentimental, sentimental, idealic, and nature. Everything else is condemned, rejected, and doomed to exclusion as immoral.

So, you know, his, tell stories, revolution, quote, unquote. I sent you a quote, a lengthy quote, from him a little while ago, where he predicts that the socialist and communist parties will be tyrannical if they take over. They're not going to have patience. This isn't about changing people's minds. This is about imposing an agenda. His view is that revolution is the gradual changing of people's minds to his as an individual matter, which is, you know, and then that I guess, it's not really much, it's not a revolution in the true sense of the term, but he deals with individuals, not with, you know, parties or, you know, he doesn't have a a movement that's going to take over.

He has his, you know, communities, he was very influential, and that these will be examples for how the world should be run. And so it's a matter of, of the individual mind, whether or not it's going to accept this or not. And if enough people do it,

then the revolution would have succeeded. Of course, all it really takes is, you know, a tiny handful of guys with rifles. to destroy it. So, and we know Tolstoy would rejected self-defense even in that regard. So his revolution wasn't really a revolution. It was something purely internal. This explains how Tolstoy has two directly opposite views on nature and human society,

on these two great parts of the external world. According to the first view, nature is divine and gracious. It was created by God. It is so connected with him that its law is his law, so that religion establishes a connection between man not only with God, the first cause, but also with the eternal infinite world that came from him. The will of God not only does not diverge from the eternal unchanging laws of nature, but directly coincides with them. The fulfillment of these laws is the fulfillment of his will. This world is driven by love, and even animals live in it peacefully and do not offend each other.

It is clear that the flesh of man, created by God, and introducing him into the composition of external nature, is not condemned, but accepted. Man is given the law of labor and the law of the birth of children. The eternal unchanging law is the law of God and the will of God, who sent woman into the world. A woman, by giving birth to children, does not sin but serves God. The connection with nature is recognized as a direct condition. of happiness and virtue. Laborious overcoming of its elements

as the first and undoubted duty of men. The unity of people with each other is declared the highest good, available to people in our world. You know, if Tolstoy were in my house right now and he saw how, you know, how my cat to organize, that's, you know, they're organized in a hierarchical fashion

as cats usually do. And that on occasion, violence is used. On occasion, Stanley, usually says a crap or something like that. But in the natural order, we see how nasty things get. People who are against zoos, I have a problem

with because they, you know, how many the young are killed in the wild. You know, women have to, I'm sorry, the females have to battle to keep their children alive. You know, hippos or cheetahs or whatever it is. It's very unfair in the human sense. And, of course, in zoos, they don't have to worry about that. I don't know why I did a capital C for connection there.

That made me smile. but people who are against zoos, I got a big problem with. I mean, good zoos, not the roadside. I'm not talking about that. No, good zoos. You know, any premature baby is going to be totally rejected and it's going to die. So the natural order is clearly, it's lawbound. There is no doubt about it.

It's law bound. But it is extremely violent sometimes. and especially among mammals. Their struggle all the time. And remember, he's writing this, Tulsa, you've got to get into this point of view at a time where Darwin was just being accepted by the elites of Britain,

which, of course, they loved more than anything in the universe. But we didn't need Darwin to talk about, you know, the nature of struggle. I don't know off the top of my head what the law of childbirth means, except to say that everything good is preceded by something bad, that pain always proceeds something worthwhile. But regardless of that, Darwin wasn't necessary to teach us about natural law. So it is, however, it remains.

in the natural order, extremely violent. And people who tend to over-dramatize it, you know, that's a classic sentimental point of view. This idyllic view of the external world, according to which everything rests on love and violence is simply unnecessary, is opposed by a second opposite understanding. According to it, the external world is a world, world of discord, enmity, and egoism. It lies in evil and temptations. It is dominated by the irresistible

law, the struggle for existence and survival of the most capable. This law guides the life of the entire organic world and therefore also of man considered as an animal. It is the law of evolution and eternal for all living things, which at the same time, contrary to the law of morality. Now, it just so happens that a toll story really struggled with that conception. I don't think he was a big fan of Darwin, but don't quote me on that. Because then if you accept Darwin, you accept warfare as a regular and natural way of functioning. What he seems to be saying here. Now, Eileen didn't accept Darwin, but.

He's giving two sides of the coin. The natural order can be seen as this beautiful, romantic, wonderful place, and it can be seen as the most bloody, horrible place you can ever ever imagine at the same time, and frankly, under the same law. The moralist does not accept this world of discord, competition, and rivalry. This world lives outside of morality and against morality, driven by a natural, greedy, ruthless, shameless, instinct that seeks pleasure in sin

and cursively enjoys sin. No matter how a person embellishes this discord in this sin, the struggle will always remain a struggle. This, that is, an activity that fundamentally excludes the possibility of the Christian morality that we recognize, quoting.

Therefore, all forms and varieties of the struggle of people with each other are reprehensible and forbidden. Both economic competition, developing technology and material culture and the struggle that flares up because of sexual drives. It is precisely this view of the external world as a deeply anti-moral environment that leads to the preaching of asceticism, simplification, and non-resistance. You know, because we share in that world in order for us to control those drawings, there has to be a full regiment, which we call, you know, monastic ascetic.

The soldier has to follow it, just like the monk has to follow it. I've always said their lives are very similar. The enemy is different. One has, you know, one is demonic, the other one is human. But we share in that order. We could make it as nasty as you see on the nature documentary. You can't say that they're in any way, you know, cheetahs or hyenas, when a hyena steals something from a cheetah, or just kill something.

It's not unfair. It's simply how it is. It exists because we live in a fallen post-identic world. That's why, you know, wild animals, you know, retreat from us other than come right up to us like we're friends. but the point here though is the notion that well they like Darwin because he you know damaged the Christian conception of things they don't like them because that means now struggle in warfare and in the British case you know colonialism and exploitation all that competition

is now considered the natural way of things. That's a natural way of things, well, that's what we should do. Now, the problem is, you know, and this is at the beginning of the post-Christian society, it's a fallen state of the world. Only through intense a cynicism can we get away from it. And even then, almost every action we commit is self-regarding. In the phenomenal world, you know,

sin is everywhere. But the aesthetics, at least struggle to put reason in a spirit, of course, over the passionate drive. Of course, Plato said the same thing. And Plato was aware of this exact same problem. The moralist is of being frightened and impressed by the exorbitant, obsessive, and pretentious reality of his body and its instinctual drives. He experiences these drives as directed toward the external world as offensive, assaulting, from the struggle for food and shelter, for property, wealth, and power, to the aggressiveness of the sexual instinct and its struggle for possession. All of this leads to violence. All of this places one on the path of the devil and draws one toward mortal sin. All of this awakens the animal personality in man and transforms him

into a cruel beast. All of this comes from the external world and draws one toward the external world. All this should be reduced to a minimum and ideally completely suppressed. And this is why in Tolstoy's mind, you know, the completely self-insulated community is the only way to go, the only way of social organization. He was an anarchist, of course, because states only exist to commit violent and taxes only exist to support states. and that's the only reason that they function at all. Not realizing, of course, that human beings are irrational. Even if they've tried to follow this so-called law of love,

which a monk really does try to follow. If you're in the secular world, someone hits on your wife, all of a sudden, you know, you're on the path of the devil again. You know, these are very powerful things that come out of nowhere where you do start to act very harshly and a million other thing. Thus, a certain sensuality, disregarding morality, is diffused in nature, not only disturbing man in the outside world, but also living within him

and constantly rising in his soul in the form of sinful lust. The moralist perceives as sinful lust in himself as the origin of evil, as an enemy of virtue eternally and insatiably stirring within the soul. Clearly the moral law categorically demands its suppression. Indulging in this lust is unworthy of man, humiliating, shameful and sinful. Virtue demands that man pity man and not lead him to sin through shame and pain, enjoying his suffering. Virtue demands chastity.

Entering into marriage cannot contribute to service to God and neighbor, and carnal love is service to oneself, should be reprimed. placed by pure relations of sister and brother, even if the human race ceases to exist because of this. People have already become accustomed to this idea. Some as a matter of religious belief. Others as a matter of scientific prediction. The birth of children would be permissible for compassionate moralists only if he saw that all existing children's lives are already provided for.

You hear that today. White women, I think, are the only ones who don't want to have kids, which is no coincidence, especially, you know, middle class and upper class white women. They have some stupid excuse, like, I don't want to bring children to this terrible, terrible world. You know that's a lie, obviously. They don't really know anything about the world. But Tolstoy wrote in Anna Kareninaum.

It's my only paper on him I ever did. a real red pill discussion. The beta provider versus the alpha soldier. And it took me a while, because it's a substantial book, took me a while to grasp of that. But how they treat each other. Now, how the woman treated the beta versus the alpha. You know, I'm reading this.

I'm going, oh, my God, this is like Ronald Tamasi. in the 19th century. I don't know if anything else that talks about that kind of thing is early as early is that. But you do also have certain, and I can't think if anyone else top my head.

Well, Fourier maybe who had this concept of the so-called community of wives. Well, that's very convenient. the Fourier's utopian socialist idea, men and women would be separate all the time. But Tolstoy was living in a world that was slowly becoming sexualized, not nearly as bad as it would be after the 1960s. But amongst the Russian nobility of his day, thanks to masonry and all this stuff, they actually had chances to be alone together. that was impossible before

you know never anyone talks to you about well you know they've always been men and boys and girls have always been like this you know they've always been no they haven't first of all they were always educated separately it was very rare they had no chances really to be alone and if they were people would notice and say something

it wasn't like today um So, you know, those of us who have these very old-fashioned ideas on sexuality, no, it wasn't always this way. But Tolstoy was the one, to his credit, to bring this out in Anna Karinina and how women will treat the rogue, in this case, a soldier, versus the very awkward provider whose name is Levin, but not a Jew, oddly enough. And, you know, Levin was, you know, treated his, he was, he was a plan B like those type of guys are, and he was, was, well, even started wondering. I don't know. I doesn't seem to like me that much. And it's incredible, but he brings up the sexual conception and sister and brother, which, of course, cannot have a good course.

So there's a lot going on here. you do have the utopian socialists roughly around this era with their separation of men and women and the so-called community of wives tends to mean the sexual revolution that goes back to the radical reformation in northern Europe

I'm not sure in Tolstoy's case that's what it meant I think in Fourier's case it would have that children are raised by the community that means I can do whatever the hell I want now isn't this great? They tried to do that in the USSR

um you know um sexual license easy divorce um and it was it failed so miserably it had such a

such an effect on Russian society that early Stalinism had to stop it. Actually, even late-Leninism, I should say. It's Alexandra Colomtei tried to promote that idea. The anarchists talk about this stuff all the time. But he can't really be talking about pure sister and brother forever. The human race would die out. But it seems here that he's actually making the accusation.

that the human race will die out here if this mentality is maintained. But I do like this, the sexual aspect of this, because Tolstoy was very into it. He understood it, I mean, in a positive way, in a way that taught a lot of young men how women really are. Kitty versus Anna, Levin versus the soldier

Whose name I can't think of Of the top of my head How they were treated so differently Because of how they were This is a bit of a problem for Tolstoy's idea Because The soldier, the man dedicated to violence Was wanted by everybody

All the girls liked them But Levin The landowner Who liked to give stuff You know Want to support somebody was not. It's always very awkward, always very...

And that's where this may come from. It's a told story before I think anyone else realized that there is still the female issue to be concerned with. And if anyone knows fighting for violence, fighting for the alpha, there's not that many out there, it's women. Aesthetically rejecting within oneself the principle of flesh and instinct as external,

anti-spiritual, violent, and evil, the moralist categorically demands the man devote himself to his corporeality as little as possible, that he reduce its needs to the bare essentials and invest all his bodily energy and physical labor, the only work worthy of man, morally honest and honorable, which does not offend anyone and does not exploit anyone. Only he who works physically works. Any mental labor is sham. It is empty tar. and deception. To be morally at his best, man must forget all licentiousness and the deceptions that cover it. He must simplify life and simplify himself. Life must be simplified both internally and externally so much that neither needs nor seeks relationships that lead people into the world of violence. It is necessary to simplify the culture, social organization, economy, furnishings, clothing, and table, excluding and eradicating from everywhere the element of external violence and the use of other people's labor. It is necessary to abolish the ownership of land, rent, and the leisure necessary for spiritual creativity, power and laws, sexual love and luxury,

industrial production and money, hunting and meat eating, interference in the lives of others in the army. In a word, everything that the external world, the natural and social world, imposes on man. We must descend to that level of primordial simplicity that is available to all people throughout the world so that everyone does only what everyone can do, and everyone serves themselves without borrowing from others or interfering with them. You know, he's gone from anarchism to now simplifying the world's, well, being totalitarian, abolishing any ownership of land, although he was a landowner,

and very strangely calling, calling on mental labor as a sham, even though that's really all he did. I'm talking about Tolstoy here. That's all that's certainly, you know, 90% of what I do. There is an excellent, you know, he did make some excellent agrarian arguments

in his work. It was anti-modernness for it. So did Rousseau, for that matter. But when you start saying, we're going to simplify the culture, social organization, economy, furnishings, clothing, Well, that's a totalitarian system. That's not an anarchist system.

How are you going to do that except by some kind of force? And that's why anarchism is so ridiculous as an ideology. It just is, you know, it has to be imposed somehow. And who imposes it? And then why give up the power? Now, of course, this is Ilin talking about Tolstoy's ideas. And, but Tolstoy was not, you know, I read enough of him. This wasn't too far from his mentality.

So his agrarian writings were excellent, but they still existed in the realm of fantasy, because he was a landowner. He never gave it up. And look at a list of things. there he wants to be used to abolish. The ownership of land, rent, the leisure necessary for spiritual creativity, power and law, sexual love and luxury, industrial production, money, hunting and meat eating, interferes the lives of others in the army. Everything that the external world, the social world imposes on man. You know, he's now moving to, or at least according to Ilin, moving to a primitivist concept. And that isn't too far from

Tolstoy. You know, he's talking about primarily, you know, how people should be, but unless there's a movement or a party, how many people are going to do this? And even if they do do this, all this is going to take is a handful of guys, again, handful of guys with rifles to kill them all and take over. So, you know, we understand what he's saying. He hated U.S.S.ri. The simplification of our lives.

lives, all this stuff. And yet his list of things is totalitarian. So, you know, and yet he's still an anarchist. It's just the nature of his intellectual world, I guess. It is precisely in connection with this world rejection that the demand arises to refrain from an active and physical struggle against evil. The external world lies in evil, and man is extremely limited in his understanding of it. Therefore, he must consistently extract his will from it, allowing the inevitable to take place.

Tolstoy writes, The question of what I should do to counteract the violence being committed before my eyes is based on the same crude superstition about the possibility for a person not only to know the future, but also to arrange it according to his own will. For a person free from this superstition, this question does not and cannot exist. Whether the use of violence or the suffering of evil is used to, or not useful, harmful or harmless. I do not know, and no one knows.

Let me, I sent you that quotation, and would you mind if I read it? I think it would be useful. You want to read it? Yeah, is that cool? Go ahead. It's from his, my confession, I think that there's a lot in here.

And when this law, and he's referring to the law of love, penetrates consciousness as the supreme law of life, it will, of its own accord. Bring an end to that attitude so harmful to morality, or by the most extraordinary injustices and cruelties people perform on one another are regarded as natural, inherently human behavior. That which is dreamed of, desired and promised by the Socialist and Communist Party regimes of the future societies will come to pass, and more besides. and this will be achieved by quite different means.

It will be achieved precisely because it will not be sought through the contradictory means of violence, which both the government and its opponents employ in order to achieve it. Freedom from the evil, which torments and corrupts men, will be attained not by strengthening or preserving existing regime, monarchy, republic, whatever, nor by suppressing the existing order and instituting better socialist or communist ones. indeed not in any instance by a few people inventing a particular social system they consider be an improvement and imposing on others by violence it will be attained rather when each one of us the majority of people without thinking worrying about the consequences to ourselves or others

induct our lives in a particular way not for the sake of some social organization assembly for the take of fulfilling for one's own life, the supreme law of life, the supreme, the law of love that does not permit violence under any circumstance. Now, I found it interesting. I was reading actually a secondary source on Tolstoy, and this came up. He certainly predicts the violence of socialism and commune, but they were just coming into their own at the time as a movement. Um, but, um, uh, that this law somehow, if you accept it, you become rational. And of it, he says, of its own accord, you'll no longer be inhuman, you'll become human again. And it's, it's, you know, using words like unrealistic seem non, non-schotally here.

Um, but, of course, He lived, you know, he didn't see World War I, World War II. But I found it interesting that he talks about what the communists and socialists were going to do. And we know what they did is. The anarchists were great during the Civil War. Yeah. Open up the prisons, send them against, you know, czar's forces or, sorry, actually really the provisional government's forces, the White Army.

That'll be great. but when we take power, you're going off to the camps, which is exactly what happened. Anarchists fill the camps as much as anyone else. But, you know, this is, it's not a, there's nothing scientific here, there's nothing philosophical here, saying we must descend to that level of primordial simplicity

that is available to all people throughout the world. You know, we have the monastic orders that do this. And that's brutal enough. And many of them fail. But of course, you get up again and, you know, continue to struggle. But he's talking about this on a nationwide, in fact, planetary scale. I like how, you know, he mentions, Eileen mentions, without borrowing from others or interfering with them. This is Eileen's description.

A few paragraphs up. So, you know, this is, and now here, right now we're going to get into some of the more extreme elements of Tolstoy's thinking, as you'll read in the next paragraph. Let us suppose, as Tolstoy does, that a criminal has raised a knife over his victim. I have a pistol in my hand. I will kill him, but I do not know and cannot in any way know whether the one who raised the knife would or would not have carried out his intention. He might not have carried out his evil intention, but I will certainly carry out my evil deed. This is all quoting. This is all a quote.

Whatever happens in external social life, a person must remember that everyone controls himself and only himself. One must remember this and not sin oneself, but do not consider the actions of others because they can never be available to us. Yeah, when he thinks the actions, really, I should have put motivations of others because you simply don't know. So, again, we've used this example before. We walk into a room. A guy has his knife over, let's say, anybody, a child, anybody else. I don't know why a pacifist would be carrying a pistol, but we have a pistol on us. And we shoot him.

Well, okay, the assumptions are this guy was going to kill the person. well we have some very very very good reasons to think that you know it's not 100% of course but we have some very very good reasons it's beyond a reasonable doubt that this guy is going to be killed then what happens if we do nothing and the knife comes down that's something Tulsaoy doesn't talk about that's how bad this um this uh you know internalization of everything where it's just the soul rejecting the outside world that's how bad it is. That he doesn't deal with that question. It's not a question. It's uninteresting to him. I think as he got older, he rejected God entirely.

I think he became an atheist and a materialist, and so it wouldn't matter one way or the other. But you see the argument that Tolstoy is trying to make here. And he's made it in a few places. You see somebody just bring this up and just read. I don't know if he's ready to bring it down and kill the kid.

All I know is that I'm certain that if I shoot him, I'm going to kill him, which is, you know, I think one of the, you know, one of the worst arguments known to literary life. You know, we haven't come into a Shakespearean rehearsal. You know, we're coming into the room for a reason. Of course, there's context. and everything. But that's a very thin strand to refuse to shoot this guy as he brings the knife down. Because clearly you're watching it happen. But it doesn't matter. And it shouldn't matter,

according to Tolstoy. It's incredible. Such as Count Tolstoy's conception of the external world and all its implications. He either contemplates the world as a divinely arranged ideal and then rejects coercion as, absolutely unnecessary, or he contemplates the world as a realm of passion, sins, and lies, in which coercion might perhaps be both necessary and advisable, but from which man must, precisely because of this, turn away, so as not to participate in its life. Both these interpretations of the external world are connected by one thing, the rejection of violence, and psychologically speaking, both of them perhaps grow directly out of the moral

needs to reject it. Violence is unnecessary if the world with all its laws has come graciously from God. Violence is unacceptable sin if the world lies in evil. The sentimental moralist sometimes consoles himself with a cosmic ideal, sometimes flees from the world, abandoning it to its fate. However, he also seeks peace and flight, and justifying the rightness of this flight as if to protect his passive virtue and his inner pleasure. He covers himself and defends himself and defends. He covers himself and defends himself with a reference to the will of God. Ah, now that's it. The will of God. Okay, so the knife comes down and the person, a victim, child, whatever, is killed. I guess this is as far as Tolstoy gets. He says, well, it was God's will that he's dead. And, you know, he was never quite able

to bring together those two conceptions of the natural world. A lot of us are like that. The natural world is both extremely violent as well as extremely beautiful. Or like human being. You know, even nations. Sometimes they can be very violent and they can also be very beautiful depending on circumstance. You know, in culture, culturally speaking. And Ilin is just through with it. He just says, yeah, we cover myself.

In other words, I rationalize it by saying, well, It's the will of God. Not sure why he wouldn't point the gun at you next, since you've seen it, or you'll go after you with a knife. You're clearly not going to shoot it. But even there, you can't use it. And if he plunged it in you, well, that's also the will of God. According to these reassuring instructions,

the external world, although it lies in evil and temptations, and governed by the immoral law of struggle, is nevertheless governed by God's will. This consists in people pitying each other and not thinking about what will come of it. One must follow only those indications of reason and love that he has placed in me for the fulfillment of his will and leave the consequences of such actions of God's discretion, for these consequences are the work of God. This is arranged by God so that everyone is responsible only for himself and that no one has either the right or the opportunity to arrange the lives of other people. It is everyone's business to arrange, to look after only his own life,

and therefore, at the sight of a crime, a person must do nothing, leaving the sinner to repent or not to repent, to reform or not to reform, without interfering or intruding into his inner world, into his sphere of God's knowledge. That section there was a quote from, you know, the opportunity to arrange the lives of other people. that's the ultimate sin here you look after yourself

the Tolstoyan community that you're a part of and the sin that's out there doesn't involve you you can't harm your so-called spiritual peace by trying to save somebody that you actually are able to save through violence and God's will this determinism

what it comes down to that what will be will be this fatalism is a way to cover it all up. Whatever happens, happens. Now, I understand that with other things. You know, I get that mentality. We do the right thing no matter what. That I understand.

And I've done it myself. It's very hard. I'm sure you have two. I know you have to. But in this context, the person must do nothing. well he may repent he might not not repent but it's not a matter of repentance it's it's

keeping it from happening and he goes so far as to say that that is you know he was he lived in a as I've said before a compared to today a very healthy society um

and you had your you know congenital lunatics you know once in a while um but nothing nothing like you have nowhere near what you have in the U.S. today. He lived in what was very family-based, very communally-based society.

And, as I've said before, again, and I'm going to say it again because it's so important to me, you know, he's able to talk like this, and he's able to go on like this because he's so protected by the peace that the Tsar of Russia maintains. you know he was never arrested for this kind of nonsense he was that communicated for him

but he was never arrested for this stuff he was seen as this a weirdo and eccentric but but I've been reading a lot of told story since we started this and he's extremely dogmatic this is what Christianity is period then he goes on to say later on this is i'm not talking about christianity at all

this is simply how we should be this is a law of love um and uh how can a christian state be involved in violent he's obviously rejected the entire old testament and rejected those parts of the new including parts in revelations and parts in um acts and things like that that seemed to suggest it that's why he he goes back to that same handful of lines over and over and over again. He was no theologian, but he acted like one. And his community brought a lot of people out of the church and to live this kind of a life. And he was extremely popular.

He was, he corresponded with Gandhi in his young life. you know, he was when Gandhi even rejected some of the extreme parts of what Tosso I was talking about. What you have here in general is this pacifist agrarian socialism, sort of, in terms of, you know. But, you know, he says on the one hand, we can't interfere with, with, with the inner world of others. We can interfere with all this. And as we said, a few paragraphs up, this is what we have to simplify.

And he gives a whole list of things that have to be simplified. I'm not sure who's going to do that. Clearly he might be talking about just the individual. So, you know, it's a very, very difficult mentality to maintain and to defend. Such an intrusion,

such going beyond the limits of one's being would mean an attempt to appropriate God's rights, to usurp God's authority, to sacrilegiously replace the will of God as supposedly insufficient. But such an attempt is always tantamount to denying God. Therefore, all that I can do in defense of my neighbor who is being killed is to suggest that the villain be satisfied with killing me. If he is not interested in my proposal and prefers to kill his victim, then I can only see in this the will of God. Yeah, you know, he's almost like, you know, and I don't know, this is, this is Elyn's description, but he's not too far off here.

You know, essentially what's being said is that if you see something terrible happening, a crime, whenever, you go in with your Bible or with your, you know, Tolstoy's writings, whatever, and you quote, you know, you try to reason with him. And if that doesn't work, he ends up killing you instead, or as well, then that's fine. That's just the will of God. The will of God does a lot of work in this theory.

And that any, it's almost like any government is, is an attempt to overthrow the will of God in the world. Again, there's nowhere in Scripture that you could find that. But he doesn't talk about the, as far as I know,

unless I'm missing something. He doesn't talk about the Old Testament. He clearly rejects it, which is, you know, heresy right then and there. There's a reason the Old Testament's in the Bible, but the Old Testament is also long and difficult and violent, and it makes people uncomfortable, but that's too damn bad.

I think we should stop here because he's going to summarize at this point. Sounds good to me. All righty. I will encourage everyone to go over to the show notes and to go over to the links in the descriptions and the videos and donate to Dr. Johnson's work. And, you know, we'll come back in a couple days and see, I don't know, this one section, this one chapter is lengthy. We might be in it for a couple more sessions.

We shall see. Yeah, I'm trying to be charitable. In other words, I'm trying to see. the best in Tolstoy's writings, but it's difficult. You know, even when laid out as he said it, even as he said it, the utterance of it is

difficult to maintain. So I don't mean to, you know, just mock it. I don't mean to do that at all. There's a concept of martyrdom here, which is also essential. Now, whether he lived this way, different story, but I'm trying to be as charitable as I possibly

but Ken, the Tolstoy, because he was obviously a brilliant man, but I think he lost his mind at some point. All right, Dr. Johnson. Thank you. So I'll see in a couple days. All right, man. See you then. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of Unresistance to Evil by Force by Ivan

Eileen. This is episode number 18. How you doing, Dr. Johnson? You know what torture is? torture is when you have Latin class in high school immediately after lunch. I couldn't keep my eyes open. I'm telling you, man. And I got this new phone, which I hate from Samsung.

Of course, you're better than all of us with your iPhone. I just assume that. I only have an iPhone for one reason, because I need. I need to be able to access the cloud to get my shit, you know, and it's just so much easier. I can access my computer at home. This is, believe me, I only got an iPhone a year ago. I had, I've had Android phones from 2008 or 2009 when they first came out or was it 2010, I don't remember, up until a year ago.

And I just need to access files from my phone. This is Samsung. I don't like it. I'm going to, you know, back in college, my junior year, I had a Panasonic dot matrix printer. And I threw it out the window from the fourth floor. My dorm room was on the fourth floor. And I could have killed somebody. Didn't even think about it.

I was on with tech support. Well, not tech support. You was my godfather who heard me do when they. Did you just throw it out the window? Yeah, just threw it out the window. You know, well, I guess you don't need me anymore. You know, I took, I was the last person to switch to regular cell phones. I had a flip phone right up until 2016 or something like that.

Oh, my God. I don't know what kind of life I'm leading. I don't know where to go with that. No, I know. I know you don't. No one knows. Sven doesn't know. No one knows where to go with that. Let's go into the text. How about that? Precisely. All right. That's what Sven does.

Picking up where we left off last time. Such is the practical worldview to which Tolstoy arrives, starting from his sentimental morality, moving forward with all his nihilistic straightforwardness and not noticing neither difficulties nor contradictions. short-sighted and suspicious. Moral judgment break into the very essence of a living worldview. Judges, criticizes, and rejects, not allowing it to be experienced, seen, or comprehended, not allowing any other, non-specificly moral religious, scientific, or spiritual, moral

experience, and envision to emerge. Spiritual nihilism is complemented by an equally nihilistic attitude towards, instinct toward the feeling of love and childbirth. The moralist teaches us to relate to the life of instinct, to its living mystery, to its healthy and spiritually significant depths, to the sacredness of marriage, fatherhood, and motherhood, with the same rejection of the life of the spirit. Pity, turning away from the spirit and weakened by the sight of another's suffering, rejects the fundamental force of life as sinful and evil, for it discerns a certain mercilessness, in nature and instinct, failing to recognize its mysterious power and its ability to be

transformed into spiritual good. Just something that was key to J.J. Rousseau. I don't know if he kept it throughout his whole life, but instinct creates communities, not necessarily reason in the sense that when someone's in trouble, I mean, not today where someone could be scamming you. But normally, when someone's in trouble, our instinct is to go and help. Unless we're a sociopath, and we don't care.

Or we cause it in the first place. But in general, that's what creates the communal mind. It's not like reasons I have the place. And as I read Tolstoy, I read a lot of Rousseau in him, too. I'm not sure he was aware of that. So, nevertheless, I don't know

off the top of my head what his views were on instinct, you know, in sense of love and childbirth. You know, he doesn't talk about it very much. Of course, Rousseau sent all of his kids away to an orphanage. so they could be, you know, raised by people who know what they were doing.

But you also find this, it's very healthy idea, and Johan Herder, one of the great founders of nationalism in Germany in the very early, late 18th century, where instinct really does matter. You can't reject it. You can't fight it. the instinct to recognize people like you and

it's not the only basis of the nation, of course, but instinct does matter here. By the time you get to the early 19th century, instinct matters a lot, and you have the rationalists who reject it entirely to the stupid idea, and the super romantics I've always been romantic in that regard

who who tend to tend to follow it I think that leads us to God I think that leads us to a lot of things that rationalism in the sense Michael Oakshock's sense of rationalism would have its reject

true to himself the sentimental moralist demands from nature what it cannot and does not want to give and cannot take it from what constitutes its riches in depth. Since he is accustomed to measuring all perfection by moral standards and seeing the divine only in pity, he is left to condemn the external world and free himself from volitional participation in it. And what else could this virtue say, seeing the divine in nothing but itself? If the attraction to the external world is a craving for violence, leading away from the good life,

then this is already pronounced a sentence not only on the world that you, draws the soul into sin, but also on the very being that is drawn to violence. Hence comes the inevitable demand to turn away from the external world, both insofar as it is outside man and insofar as it is hidden within man himself. Even if this means reducing man to the level of primitive barbarism, spiritual blindness, physical and cleanliness, and wholesale extinction. Remember the concept of the peaceful savage, that whole, that was an 18th century concept. That's long gone.

People had a far more realistic understanding of this. But Ilin harps on the same issue over and over again. That by adopting Tolstoy's mentality, those like him, You focus on yourself to such an extent that the world doesn't matter. The world around you doesn't matter. And you can't help but feel yourself morally superior, kind of like you do with your iPhone. You can help to feel morally superior to those around you. You know, what I said before about doing a lot, I had my ravioli just before this.

It's a stupid thing. I think I overestimated how long it took to make, because I don't know how to cook. Anyway. But the external world and having to deal with it is for him a huge problem. It's this an external world where you're going to have to face questions like we dealt with last time. You walk into a room with a guy with a knife, et cetera. That's external. the internal world everything makes sense.

And the internal world, everything, you know, your psychic world, everything falls together. And there you're safe. And it is stupid. I'm not so sure. Tolstoy would accept that idea. But still, that's really what it comes down to. If the external world lay in evil and the eternal irresistible law that governs it is immoral, Then should we not turn away and flee from the world, saving ourselves?

The moralist frees man from the calling to participate in the great process of natural enlightenment and in the great historical battle between good and evil. He relies on, he relieves him of the task of finding his creatively victorious place in the world of things in men. He relieves him of the obligation to participate in bearing the burden of the universe. He gives him a simplified template for judging the world and places him before the dilemma, either idle or flight. And by this, he teaches him moralizing superficiality and irresponsibility,

irresponsible, spiritual desertion. While instructing people in such supposedly, in such supposed wisdom and righteousness, he apparently doesn't realize that his teachings instill anti-religious arrogance. and blindness and souls. I think you see how machine translation is useless in some of these areas when it gets this complicated. You know, this is more the same.

It's not, you know, Christians do believe that the world lies in evil. That's one of our definitions of the world. It doesn't mean we don't fight the evil. What do you do when you've rejected? rejected the idea of fighting evil. One thing you have left is your inner state. It becomes incredibly selfish, incredibly pompous, like you with the iPhone. And just, you know, I'm better than everybody else, and it doesn't matter.

What else you have left? You know, Christians of all, you know, Orthodox and Catholic, we, the world does lie in evil. Sorry, I can't speak English, lay in evil. But it does. More so now than it did then. But we still, we have means to do battle with it, whatever it is. When you cut yourself off from those means, what do you have left? You know, this superficiality that he talks about, you know, I can't help but picture of the woman,

the almost all female demonstrations in Europe with the signs saying, welcome migrants, this childish mentality that they have, not thinking at all about consequences, just about how it makes them feel and believing the lies of the journalists and everything else. And, of course, the other point he makes here very importantly, his template for judging is simple, but everyone likes simple, right? even though the world is not simple.

And he doesn't have to do much. When you're called on to fight the powers of the world, the powers of evil, that generally sucks. That means we're going to maybe be martyrs one day. I don't know. He doesn't have to worry about that. He's not going to fight it by force. It is precisely this lack of true religious self-awareness

that allows him to cover up his blind fight. with references to the will of God. Indeed, if the world is created by God, then why is it evil and immoral? And if it is immoral and evil, then how can it be within the will of God? If the world was created by God, then what right does man have to call for rejection of the world? And if he flees from the world as governed by the godless law of struggle, then where do these reassuring references to the will of God ruling the world come from? I guarantee you that's not something that Tolstoy,

when he deals with his critics. I dealt with that book that had the chapter that was a long time ago. Refuting my critics. I guarantee you none of this stuff came up. He creates straw men. He creates people like us as absolutely ridiculous people

with ideas that make no sense until he could just knock them down easily. You know, he should have stayed with fiction. He really should have. However, the sentimental moralist ignores this and advances the idea of God's will whenever he needs to cover up for his own moralizing or weakness of will. He declares human volitional participation in bearing the burden of the universe to be gross superstition. The true faith consists in attributing all that troubles the soul, all external social evil, to God's will. In other words, what he's saying here is it's a cop out.

It's God's will that, you know, you walk into the room with the guy with the knife, and you don't do anything, and he gets, well, that was God's will to begin with. And anything that happens like that, it's God's will. God's will is a very nice deterministic idea that shields these people, the Tolstoyans, from having to deal with any kind of consequences. And, you know, this is why there are communities, many communities of Tustodians have failed miserably. This true faith asserts that all intractable malice

and all its villainous manifestations are sent by God, and that any attempt to stop these evil deeds would be sheer sacrilege. If we accept this teaching, it turns out that God wants not only for all people to love and pity one another, but also for very many people, not yielding to the compassionate persuasions of others to be savage and villainous, physically raping and killing the virtuous and spiritually corrupting the weak-willed in children. And further, it turns out that God absolutely does not want the activities of these ferocious scoundrels

to meet with organized resistance and suppression. That's what you come up with. That's the final conclusion to this nonsense. you know and he's and he's writing this after the Bolivic revolution

I'm not sure to what extent this mattered in Russia it was so painful you know I have a paper of course I have a paper on

the Orthodox Church accepted the white government the provisional government with a few exceptions often using that very same idea. And it's, I couldn't help, but it is superficial. It's lazy.

And it doesn't keep you from having to do anything, keeps you from having to think very hard. This new God allows, this new God leads to criminals expanding the scope of their villainy by offering themselves as a sacrifice. If someone instead of providing villains with ever new defenseless victims and stops their relentless assaults on society, this God will condemn this as blasphemy and impiety. When a criminal offends anyone and corrupts the soul of a child, this is pleasing to God. But when the victim seeks to prevent the criminal from doing so, this is not pleasing to God.

It's a blatant contradiction. This is a huge argument against Tolstoy here. that because it's all God's will, criminal offending someone, that's not so much pleasing to God, but it's God's will. But when you want to stop it, oh no, this is against God's will. It's absurd. It's absurd to the high. And this little paragraph here is a consolidation of the whole argument.

This new God, sorry, by concealing their sentimental weakness of will and their short-sighted nihilism with such a monstrous religious construct, which ascribes to God the will to evil and the freedom to commit villainy. Moralists apparently fail to notice how all this Philistine theologizing and moralizing leads them to a whole nest of religious contradictions and morally false propositions. Thus, on the one hand, God is love and desires mutual compassion and unity from people. On the one hand, only good corresponds to the will of God, and the human will receives an ideal of moral perfection that is unattainable for it. On the other hand, everything that is from the will of God and the criminal himself committing villainy by his will, he has no reason to

refrain from his evil deeds, but can always cover them up with the same excuse with which the moralist covers up his lack of will. On the one hand, a person must accept the will of God as his own and fulfill it in life. On the other hand, a person is obliged to extract his will from that sphere where the will of God begins. But this means that the entire doctrine of the relationship between God's will and man's will falls prey to contradiction and arbitrariness. And this is one of this huge flaws that I know, because, you know, Tulsoy wasn't a logician

by any means. He was an ex prose writer. excellent. No one denies. I know he could take that from him. But he gets into these fields almost pretty suddenly. You know, and he's out of his depth. No, we know what the truth of the matter is. As members of God's church, it's up to us to fight the evil around us. That could mean terrible things for us.

meant terrible things for us. And then you turn around, let's say you lose a job because you, you know, like I did, because of some, you know, you got into a fight with someone over a ideological matter. And you turn around, you see that the Tolstoyan, you know, having not done a thing, not saying a word, and it is doing perfectly fine. You know, it's God's will that you lost that job and I'm doing wonderfully. it's not even so much arbitrariness, but it certainly is contradictory. The sentimental moralists sometimes accepts God's will when this acceptance leads him to passive enjoyment of pity,

and sometimes it's not accepted when this acceptance would lead him to heroic, volitional service. This is explained by the fact that he turns to God, his gifts, and the trials and tasks that come from him, not with his whole soul and not with his whole mind and not with his whole strength, but only with the sentimentality of his pleasure-seeking and weak-willed heart. You notice that that doesn't come up in his one-liners. It was like dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses anymore. And through his theologizing, which is very rare, he has like five or six lines total that he uses and he goes back to him, back to him back to him.

he doesn't like lines like this he doesn't like the whip in the that's a command whipping the um um um money changers out of the temple you know when christ was

taken by the Jews and brought to Roman authority who did not want to kill him they didn't want to kill him pilot came up with every excuse imaginable to avoid it. The Jews said, we're going to go to Caesar. If worse comes to worse, you know, so obsessed were they with destroying? Um, um, you know, of course, you know, the Tulsoyan, of course, wouldn't have, when Peter gets his, um, ear chumped off, I'm sorry, when Peter chumps the ear

off of somebody else and Christ restores it, that's just, that's not a command necessarily. He just has to fulfill his mission now and be tortured to death. that's not a command that's quite different from a command um you know you just have to use your common sense here um and then yes it comes down to pleasure seeking utilitarianism and uh the weak will and i could just i could picture you know the typical to stoian i could picture them um i've met i think one in my life they have that list you know that's so irritating um of course, in the minute we are under, you know, under attack, suddenly, that will suddenly be God's will.

But nothing else. And it is arbitrary in that regard. This is precisely why he proves religiously blind in his approach to the external world, with its mysterious complexity, its tragedy of disunity and volitional challenges, its essence reducible to neither ideal nor ungodly wretchedness. The moralist's religious experience is spiritless, weak-willed, one-sided and meager. His religious teaching is the product of a complacent intellect, attempting to extract divine revelation from an aimless, touching compassion.

His entire religion is nothing other than the morality of compassion. And a misplaced compassion. It's the same, you know, the women who are out there with their signs, migrants welcome. You know, even if you were to tell them, here's the truth of the matter, they'll still be out there. Because that's complexity. That changes to think. No, people need this simplistic narrative, this simplistic story. You know, and it goes back to what we said from almost in Shulzhenitsyn, too, from the beginning is that the regime, they don't know us very well at all.

However, we know their stuff backwards and forward. It's very important to know. But this is not really even compassion because damage is being done. People are being hurt and they don't have to do anything. This has something to do with people who don't like the police being too hard on a criminal or don't like prisons being too tough. You know, they couldn't be a prison. guard for five seconds without just losing their minds. But this is the same kind of mentality.

When it forces them to think of complex issues, they'll run as fast as they can. This morality offers man not the experience of God's perfection, but only the experience of human compassion. It sees man in torment and reduces all revelation to sympathy for this torment. But this means that he perceives not man through God, but understood God through man, and not man illuminated with the ray of love for God, but his perception of God was obscured by compassion for suffering people. This is precisely why he found suffering man, but failed to find his relationship with God,

his own relationship with God, or God's relationship to him, the sufferer, and to himself, weakly and sweetly pitying himself, and he attempted to pass off the entire misunderstanding as the teaching of Christ. Yeah, it's more the same. You know, suffering man is by God's will. You don't have to worry, unless it's us, of course.

I've dealt with these people before, not Tolstoyans as such, but I had another professor one time tell me when I was teaching, boy, you guys really enjoy excluding people. I said, yes, yes, we do. And that was the end of that conversation. But this compassion goes to liberation theology. I can't help. They know what Marxism does to people.

But in their mind, if it's words on a page and it makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside, it must be true. And therefore, you have people like Romero, the Church of Rome canonized, which made me nauseous. I did a whole lecture on it. He was a part of, you know, he was running guns for the FMLN. You know, that was okay, of course. But it's that same mentality that you find in the so-called Jesuit universities of Latin America preaching that a particular version of liberation theology that John Paul II condemned. If this is a religion, then it is a religion that binds not man to God, but man to man.

and moreover, an inaccurate and fragile bond, not spirit to spirit before the face of God, but soul to soul in the face of earthly torment. The bond is not created by the whole soul or by the will, but only by the effect of inner tenderness. It is formed in mutual sympathy with the hardships of personal life, but disintegrates in a weak-willed rejection of the common burden at the first breath of genuine evil. Yeah, it's formed by weakness, so it's not compassion. It's not sympathy. It's not pity. It's not empathy. It's none of those things. It's simple weakness. That's what binds them together. And so they do end up contradicting themselves and being very arbitrary in who they decide can be killed and who can't.

But it is a weak-willed understanding. And for an understanding that comes from a weak-will, I should say. True religion begins with God and proceeds to acceptance of the world. while this teaching begins with man and proceeds to rejection of the world. True religion accepts the world by will, but does not wholly accept the evil that arises within it and therefore wages a willful, heroic struggle against it. This teaching does not see the world because of the evil that hides within it and turns away from evil, from the world, and from the willful struggle against it. True religion is creative passion for goodness, that is, for spirit and love.

while their teaching is affirmed as practical indifference to the work of evil in the world, to human spirituality, and to its fate on earth. Ah, that's it. I spend quite a bit of time on that word, indifference. In other words, I'm trying to be neutral about this. Even though it might be God's will, ultimately it's really indifferent, and the weak will has to see things in relative terms. Do you know it's 94 degrees here?

I am this my air conditioner is having it gone off for one second I'm not supposed to be living in this environment what the hell's going on here this is just this is unbelievable that that must be some of the evil in the world that he talks about that's right but the founder of um one of the men who created the first um um motors that that could power an air conditioner was a j lube's the university in Nebraska, by the way. I wonder if he ever saw clowns walking down the center of the street.

Well, it was turn of the century. You know, it was weird. I don't know how weird it was then. But I bet you it was relatively weird, given, you know, 1910. I forget when he was there. But I saw clowns walking down the street. I could walk through the, I could cut through the yard of the governor and wave inside. Like, it's a normal house.

you know, all kinds of, which is a weirdest place. Lincoln, Nebraska is the weirdest place to live. I'm telling you now. And I still, to this day, I miss it. There's something about it. And anyone has to get a chance. You're young, young students want to go to grad school there. I'm telling you, it's one hell of an experience.

You've got to get used to it. All right. Last paragraph in this chapter. Such are the religious foundations of the sentimental morality. Its ultimate outcome is religious apathy and spiritual indifference. And in this apathy and indifference, it loses the objectivity and power of religious love and fails to grasp either its earthly tasks and paths or its transformations and achievements in the world. You know, I don't, I don't want to preach the truth the way I do. You know, this isn't in my interest.

I know that I've been I've been badly damaged by it but it is still the truth and when I think of people I think of people who even if we were to somehow win and in any battle with the regime they'd say oh we were with you all along

you know but but this line of work it's not something we enter into purposely we're called to it and is precisely from the opposite of apathy the opposite of indifference.

It's objectivity and the power of religious love. And for me, it started with abortion and one from there. But, you know, who wants to do this, you know, full time? I mean, yeah, I do enjoy it. I have to say it. But still, I couldn't, you know, I'd be a full professor somewhere if I was a Tolstoyan. Isn't that convenient? rather than having been fired from places as a result.

That's your job as a professor. And the tostoyans are still there preaching nonsense. And I'm here. Not that I'm complaining. But our suffering here is due to the sins of the world, and we accept it. That's what he means by the acceptance of the world in a few paragraphs earlier. You know, my God, I could have been a fuel director. like my father and made a lot of money.

No, this is something that you call to. I'm not sure you're called to being totally indifferent. It's the opposite. We talked about the word abulia in Greek. This lethargy that comes from indifference and apathy, but it's not just that. It's an apathy and indifference that comes from not believing there's anything worth fighting for or dying for.

And ultimately, this is what this ideology leads too. All right. I think starting another chapter here would be, uh, would just be tedious. So let's leave this for the next episode and just make this a short one. Sound good? Yeah, I have no problem with that. I can keep going though if you want. Let's save it for next time. Let's do, um, if we're going to start a new, if we're going to, I mean, it looks like he's really starting a new subject there. So let's, uh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We got, we got to retort. our brains here. So I mentioned it's 94 degrees here.

You guys down there, you used to this kind of garbage. Yeah. You're used to it. I don't know. Also, everybody who listens now, I know I have an iPhone and that I actually think I'm better than everyone because of it. We assume that.

I shouldn't, you know, it's almost a redundancy. You know, it's funny. I used to be much more obnoxious about being an Android I was much more obnoxious about being an Android user because, you know, I just thought, oh, people who, people who, you know, iPhones are for normies. You know, it's like, oh, that's like the normie thing to do. An Android, I can do all these things with it. I don't have to jail break it if I want to do this and that and everything.

And, yeah, I guess, I guess with age, I'm just becoming a little more normie when it comes to stuff like that. when I got my doctoral degree, I moved to D.C. And I bought an IMac. You know, and this is the influence of the ex-wife. Remember the clear purple thing with a little hockey puck? Sure. And believe it or not, I didn't think I was pure to anybody else. And it was a big pain in the ass just like this, this, this, this, my new phone is.

So, you know, I was quite happy to go back to Hewlett Packard or whatever. I got Dell. I had a bunch of computers over the years. But yeah, I got the Purple Imac. Very exciting. Well, all right. Everyone, go over to the show notes. Go over to the description in the video.

Donate to Dr. Johnson's work. I'm suffering here. I'm suffering here. Donate to me just for that reason. He needs to put Central Air in there. Let's get them enough money so they can do a central air, a central air unit, big carrier unit. Yeah, I could do, even though carrier stole Lub's idea, I could, yeah, go fund me maybe. I don't know.

When you live in Alabama, you don't give a fuck about who stole somebody's idea. You just worry that your fucking AC is working. Yeah. That's right. It says carrier on there. I don't care if it's, it's work. The three great,

three great inventions of modern era. The air conditioning, God knows, God knows, even though it's had its own effects. Caller ID. And I forget the third one. Podcast.

I'll stop my head. Podcast. But I remember caller ID. Now I don't have to just pick up blind anymore. That was wonderful. Yeah. That was wonderful. Now it didn't have to pay the phone at all.

All right. Let's get out of here. Talk to you in a couple days. Thank you. All right, my friend. Talk to you then. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of On Resistance to Evil by Force by Ivan Eileen.

Dr. Johnson. How are you doing today? We have the haze from the Canadian wildfires. I think it's from the Canadian wildfires. We've been hanging over Pennsylvania. Since it's been raining, it's gone to an extent. But my God, you could hardly see the sun. It was crazy.

It was like an orange dot in the sky. Also, I don't want to alarm anybody, but I have three cats in the room, including Stanley and I make no promises as to their behavior so so let's get to do this quickly before things really hit the fan

have you recovered from your feeding adventures this morning oh yeah it takes you know you know with a diabetic dog so there's a special diet um a diet that it just so happens the cats really really really love and so it's I have to feed

you know what it comes to this nine seven cats and two dogs and yeah it's a struggle it's a battle but Stanley runs it pretty you know he has an iron fist or an iron tail I should say and of course he's fed first

and so yes I'm doing fine And it's, yeah, feeding them in the morning is a struggle. All right. New chapter. It looks like we're going to be moving into some new territory here. So here we go. Chapter 13, general principles.

After all that has been revealed and established, it's unlikely that an unbiased researcher could doubt the need for a renewed and more profound approach to the entire problem of external compulsion. A true answer is possible only if the question is correctly posed, and correctly posed demands from the questioner a faithful and free exertion of all the powers of soul and spirit, and above all, a spiritually perceptive love and a religiously intense will. There are spiritual faculties that are completely incapable of such faithful exertion. But precisely for this reason, it is wiser and more honest for people of this faculty to

admit their impotence and modestly remain silent, not participating in the discussion of this problem. When a morally noble soul seeks in its love a religiously faithful, strong-willed response to the violent onslaught of evil coming from outside, then people who are timid, insincere, indifferent, irreligious, nihilistic, or realist, or realist, everything is relative and conditional, quote unquote, weak-willed, sentimental, who do not accept the world, and who did not see evil can only hinder this search, confusing, distorting, and leading it down false paths. He could be talking about any number of things,

but certainly the civil war was probably on his mind. Here, Russia is fighting for its life. It gets no assistance from the Allies, despite all the mythology. The white army is deeply divided. The last thing in the world you can deal with, are these weak-willed sentimental people, and they have no right to be talking at this point in time.

Precisely, because there's no other choice but to use violence. If Tolstoy were there, I guess you would say let the Reds take over. That's God's will. So this is the first main general principle that we pose the question, but given our experiences thus far, and the Bolshek revolution is, you know, the main one, you know, these type of people, the Tustodians, need to just keep their mouths shut. If anyone were to listen to them, there would be no Russia.

There would be no civilization. The question of the permissibility of external coercion and suppression is posed correctly, only if it is posed on behalf of living goodness, which has historically struggled in the history of humanity with the living element of evil. is it permissible for representatives of genuine living goodness to mentally coerce weak people in this struggle and physically coerce and suppress the activity of the evil influencing their evil-doing souls and evil-doing bodies and if it is permissible then to what extent under what conditions and in what forms now is a long question um but um the main the other principle now here is and he gets into more detail later

is that it's not just being opposed to evil. There has to be a goodness. There has to be a positive purpose to all of this, which is what living goodness means. The rebuilding of all Russia, Orthodox and the monarchy and everything else, social justice. That has to be the,

you know, there has to be a good end to your fighting evil. It can't just be fighting evil just because it's evil. You know, so it becomes a complex notion. and I know this is a long question, but it takes all of the variables into account. And that's what he's trying to do. Obviously, the answer is yes. But genuine living goodness, almost by definition, would not be weak

and would be nothing but exhausted by the Tolstoyans around them who are going around telling them to lay down their arms. what do you do with them? So genuine living goodness is by definition someone who's going to use whatever methods are possible or available to fight evil and have good end, and to be good themselves. The very essence of this question already predetermines and provides for the source, direction, and purpose of this influence. It must flow from a genuine will to good. It must be self-directed and direct the one compelled toward genuine good.

It must have the goal of strengthening and realizing goodness and souls. This is a necessary level of inquiry, below which the entire question loses its philosophical interests and its vital significance. For it is not worth asking what exactly is permissible for a criminal who desires to incite another soul to evil deeds. Nothing is permissible for him. He knows this, and therefore, without asking, he allows himself everything. The entire question is posed not from the perspective of the criminal mind, but from the perspective of one who loves goodness and sincerely serves it. In other words, the person who is fighting evil has to be good and has to use, again, whatever it means or available, and not go to excess. As he says, direct the one compelled towards genuine good.

It must have the goal of strengthening goodness and souls or goodness in general. Keep in mind, you know, after a massive civil war, first of all, you'll have World War I. And that's horrible enough. Then you have the Russian Civil War. I mean, you have PTSD everywhere. And, you know, half the time with these exiles, you're not dealing with normal. You know, these people have been, have been through the mill in a way that we really can't comprehend. end. And the fact that they're coherent and fighting is a testament to their internal strength.

This is another reason why they have absolutely no time for the to Stoian movement. Precisely for this reason, any and all attempts to divert this question from the questioning subject from their tasks and intentions are senseless and spiritually dead. Attempts to formally equate good and evil, the noble fighter in the criminal in a discussion of their rights to coerce and suppress. These attempts usually emanating, besides sentimentalists, from cowardly relativists, nihilists, and shameless sophists boiled down to separating the method of influence from its spiritual source, from its direction and its goals, and further, to condemning this method.

I like to use the example here, and when I was translating this, I had it in mind the so-called drug war. Well, it's not a war. We know it's not a war because every soldier for evil gets a lawyer, sometimes several, and has the ACLU behind them, and the police are constantly attacked by the lefts for doing anything against them. How can you even talk about a war if that's the case? you know, when you talk about Iwo Jima, every Japanese soldier did not have a lawyer. They were simply shot. And that's why he says nothing is permissible for him.

And it's also why when the Reds took, actually any revolutionary movement took over, the first thing they do is open the prisons. They can create chaos in which they, because they're so cohesive, will then end acting as the savior of the people. And some of these criminals end up doing very well in the revolutionary organization. Moreover, such assertions are usually uttered in a tone that tolerates no objection, as if the matter boils down to the proclamation of some incontestable moral axiom, which is victorious by its very utterance.

In fact, the supposed axiom is the product not of living, spiritual, and moral experience, but, at best, of an ignorant mind attempting to evaluate the external as such by its formal, abstract attributes as such. Good and evil are not in reality equivalent in value or equality, and their living bearers, implementers, and servants are likewise not equivalent in value or equality. To call someone who stops a crime, a violent man, is only possible from blindness or hypocrisy. To condemn equally the execution of a villain and the murder of a righteous martyr is only possible from hypocrisy, stupidity, or blindness.

Only for a hypocrite or a blind person are St. George the Victorious and the dragon he pierced equal. Only a hypocrite or a blind person can maintain neutrality in the face of this feat and appeal to humanity, protecting oneself and biting one's time. What we take for granted in our criminal justice system was utterly inconceivable as as Eileen wrote these lines. I know it's a little bit off topic, but our systems of criminal justice

were not designed for the level of criminality that has overtaken our cities. It's not designed for the occasional crime. I mean, this is why everyone takes a plea. If you had a trial for every criminal, you would need 100,000, of thousands of judges.

It's not meant for this. This is why militaries take over government. This is why you have the situation in El Salvador. This is why you have states of emergency. And by equating good and evil, ultimately that's what relativism is about. That's what liberalism is about. Liberal state is one, they claim,

that doesn't have any ideology behind it. It simply, you know, enforces the law, enforces contracts. Of course, it's ridiculous, but that's their claim. But in their claim, they are equating good and evil. Any kind of indifferenceism will equate good and evil. And it's, you know, dealing with people, it's one of the reasons I don't miss having Facebook anymore, because I had to deal with this every day. It's so exhausting with people who don't, who are.

aren't catching this here. Bernie gets from, the early 80s in New York City. Do you remember him? Yeah, I love that when that happened. Oh, yeah, yeah. In high school when that happened. I was,

I remember my father watching TV saying, what the hell's the problem here? He stopped a crime. He would have been killed. He did the role of favor. And you had huge factions in New York City. at the time, calling for his head. And that could only come from hypocrisy, stupidity, or blindness.

And I think there's a fourth option, and that is that they're a part of the criminality itself. And I've dealt with the issue of why the left really loves criminality, why they support criminals to such an extent. I know that, you know, there's false accusations. I know there's false convictions. I understand that. But that's only going to increase when you overload a system that's not meant for mass criminality.

The American criminal justice system was not meant for this overwhelming crime. To the point where police departments have been cut in half, gangs control entire regions, especially of Detroit, places like that. This is what happens. And yet the cops are still condemned for taking action. really pretty much any action now, so long as the races are right. And what message is that sent to the criminals? When Detroit had to,

was so broke that they had to eliminate their anti-gang unit in their police force, gangs then got the message and took over entire sections of the city. I don't know if you remember this. It was back when Bing was the mayor, former NBA star. The cops were, when you entered the city in the highway, they had signs saying, we cannot guarantee your safety here.

This is a war zone. And he eventually resigned saying it's impossible to deal with this city. You have, you know, 50% illegitimate, you know, you have 50% illiteracy and everything else. and the only thing that the media, the Jews, the left cares about are these non-white criminals. And so that would be inconceivable to him back then, but he's seeing it an outline. He's seeing this mentality. I don't know what he would do if he were alive today. Again, he would just think that everyone's possessed, just like the other example.

you know, or that this is just a criminal system, regime. It has to be destroyed by regime. You know, my definition of the word regime was probably what he would say. It's inconceived. You know, that would just absolutely blow his mind. It is precisely the nature of goodness itself that determines both the question of the admissibility of physical coercion and suppression and the answer to it. For living goodness, living in.

and its bearers, executioners, and servants is a true source, direction, and goal of coercion and suppression directed against the evil ones among us. That's extremely important. You have to be good yourself. And, you know, so this is not maccuvianism. It's not, you know, the end justify the means necessarily, except in the most extreme of circumstances. That's very difficult to discern.

So not only are you fighting evil, you have to have a sense of the good that you're fighting for, and you also personally have to be good. And that gives the criminal element a massive advantage. By their very essence, good and evil are a mental, spiritual nature, and their seat is the human soul. Therefore, the fight against evil is a mental and spiritual process. Evil is conquered by the one who transforms it into good. that is, from the depths transform spiritual blindness into spiritual sight,

and the power of petrifying hatred into the grace of accepting love. This is the fundamental essence of the fight against evil and the victory over it, and therefore every measure directed against evil must ultimately serve precisely this goal, deriving meaning and significance from it. That is why physical coercion and suppression have never been and never will be a sufficient means in this fight, the one who, depriving a villain of freedom or life, thinks that this is the main thing and that more is needed, understands neither the nature of good and evil, nor the fight against them.

He sees nothing but the external symptoms of the disease and ignores the illness itself and its activity, despite its superficial usefulness, may prove harmful, in essence. Physical coercion and suppression acquired their full significance only within a system of correctly directed social education that observes the laws of spirit and love. When we spoke of the Solstern-Eason book, we spent quite a bit of time, or at least I did, talking about the fact that Zaris Russia didn't have a prison system until it was absolutely forced on them, pretty much at the end of its existence. Usually, well, crime was extremely low, and the Communion usually took care of that kind of thing.

monasteries were places where criminals were sent, their families had to pay the fine, and he had to work out his problem. Again, assuming they weren't just absolute mental cases, but you didn't have much of that back then. Today, it's everywhere. It was only until terrorism got so bad in all Russia that they had to create some sense,

I mean, even sending them to Siberia, yeah, it sounds bad. Remember, we talked about that, and they all came back, and then crossed the border and ended up in Switzerland. No problem. With plenty of money and plenty of support from the West. And it's a shame. You know, wise Arniglis didn't just order the execution of Lenin to shoot the guy. Of course, it's, you know, not here or there.

or would that have done it? Would someone else have taken over? Trottyky have simply taken over. But this last sentence is incredibly important. The use of violence, physical coercion, only really matter systemically. Social education that's directed to the good that observes the laws of spirit and love.

You know, hatred has a purpose when people you love are under assault. Of course. It's an engine. It's a motivating factor. But it certainly can't be the only factor. It has to be very tightly controlled. Everything has to be based on reason and the understanding of natural law.

There's no getting out of it, which in the moment may seem almost impossible. But we're talking about systems here, not necessarily individual. And again, it's those three things. The fight against evil, the fact that you have a. actual agenda. This is something by the way the White Army never had. There were factions of the White Army like Dietrich's group who wanted to return to the monarch and stuff like that, but the White Army in general claimed to have no ideology. Colchak and the rest of them just wanted an insituent assembly or something like that, you know, pretended not to have any ideology.

They weren't necessarily monarchists. Only small factions were. Capel. Notice that the non-Russian names seem to be the most royalist. But one of the reasons that they lost, one of the many reasons is that they never had an agenda. They never can go to people saying, this is, we want to return of the monarchy and a commune and everything else. This is our agenda. The communists, the Reds were able to do that. And a lot of it was a lie, of course. But they had a very bumper sticker-like ideology that they could speak to even ordinary people with.

And it worked. Of course, they would never talk about destroying the church and all that, but, you know, giving land to the peasants who already had it, destroying land, you know, they at least had an agenda, but in the Maine, the White Army did not have one. And so you had the fight against evil, yes. But you didn't have a system that was dedicated to proper social education. These men were actually very good.

the general, the commanders of the different white armies. Unfortunately, we all know that that's a disadvantage when you're dealing with someone like Trotsky who had no conscience whatsoever. But saying that you have no ideology, it allowed the Reds and the West to tell everyone what these people were all about. They're going to bring the landlords back or something stupid like that. And not responding to it made them look at. terrible. They said, they had no conception of propaganda. The monarchy never had a concept. You know, it's beneath the monarchy to deal with propaganda. Unfortunately, you know, they paid for it,

but this is a problem. It's, you know, and I guarantee you he's thinking about this, at least part of this, you know, there was no sense of the good in the white armies. they didn't have an agenda, they were so divided, and they allowed their enemies to define what they were fighting for. So all you had was the fight against evil and the fact that they were personally decent men. There was that second one, the key one, the agenda, fighting for a good thing, a system of education,

that they didn't have, and it cost them. Furthermore, good and evil, being essentially soul-spiritual entities, reside within man and are realized through man, and therefore through him, enter the world of the body and matter. Clearly, if man were purely spiritual and completely incorporeal being, the struggle against evil would be limited to sole spiritual efforts and accomplishments, and then physical influence between a good and evil-doer and an evil-durer would be impossible. But in reality, the world is structured differently, and such influence is entirely possible. Likewise, if man experienced evil solely through his soul and possessing a body were deprived of the ability to manifest evil boldly and vent it in external action, or if man's soul and body were not naturally linked in a living, organic, symbolic union and did not directly transmit their states and changes to each other, then physical restraint and compulsion would fall away as unnecessary and meaningless.

However, in reality, man is constructed differently. He actually vents his inner evil and external actions, and his body actually transmits to his soul the protest of another against his evil deed. Conversely, if man were a purely corporeal being devoid of soul and spirit, then physical restraint and restraint would be the soul and exclusive means of combating evil. However, in reality, this is precisely not the case. Well, that latter part would be Thomas Hobbes. Thomas Hobbs did not believe in the soul. He was an atheist, materialist, materialist, moral. less, and all he had was a Leviathan, something stronger than any group of people that can

impose its will. Only spiritual beings, well, that sounds like the Tostoyans, this internal selfishness. They retreat into themselves as, you know, the font of purity, and claiming that anything that happens around them is just the will of God, which couldn't be more destructive during the Russian Civil War. And these guys were in exile because of the Russian Civil War. There's no doubt it was constantly on their mind. Not to mention the fact that they were hunted, you know, they were hunted by the NKVD all the time.

You know, they had to move and to keep moving. Some of these guys were targets. Eileen was definitely a target. Stozynese was a target. Dostoevsky was, well, of course, people followers of Dostoevian in exile, were targeted. But Bredaiev was a target. And they were aware of that. The NKBD was far more concerned with internal stuff.

However, but those are the two elements. Either you have the Tolstoyan naval gazing, on the one hand, or Thomas Hobbs' violence on the other. That's what we're talking about here. But man is a union of body and soul. Christ is, and so I always will keep saying this, the most significant feat in European history is the Council of Tel-Sodon, which laid out in detail, the concept of Christ,

as God and man connected in a voluntary union each one having their own will they preserved the human side of things in a voluntary union with the divine side of things almost everything that we

Europeans believe from then on derives from them if you were to stress the divine too much then man's free will would disappear if you were to stress man's will too much then God would be inaccessible. That was the nature of the heresies in the first millennium.

People who don't think they matter. Oh, they mattered. They mattered. It wasn't just the God's Christ's makeup, but it also was reflected in the men that were created by him, by logos. It's a similar connection. But notice that when, you know, Charleston made it clear, divine human, the divine includes everything, the church, all that stuff, sacrament, human includes everything, nation, states. But they have to be voluntarily connected, which means that each one has to have, each nature has to have its own will.

And a lot of people didn't like that. The, a bunch of emperors tried to smash it. but when you understand the significance of chalcedon you see how that created europe that created a mentality that's in line with precisely this definition of the human being that's soul and body and there's no way to overstate the significance of chalcedon and he's hinting at it right here in view of all this the use of physical force and the fight against evil is possible and not without meaning but by no means exclusive or self-sufficient, but a secondary and subordinate means in the general system of spiritual life,

and, moreover, a means applicable within the boundaries of spiritual permissibility and necessity. For its external physical nature is alien and inadequate to the principle of evil that is being overcome. Physical coercion and suppression deal not with evil itself, but only with its external manifestation. It does not penetrate to the necessary depths of the hardened soul, and the level to which its positive influence reaches remains comparatively superficial. Therefore, it is powerless to transform evil as such and overtakes it only when the spiritual transformation has no longer taken place, and evil has succeeded in pouring itself out into external action. As an insufficient, secondary, and subordinate means, it must conform not only to the laws of the spirit and the good,

but also to the nature of the main means and to the needs of the main struggle. It should in no way encroach on replacing spiritual efforts and measures with physical ones. It should in no way harm a person's spiritual transformation. Physical coercion is an extreme measure of struggle and their scope of application begins only with internal measures where internal measures prove ineffective and insufficient. I've said this in the past, and it was something that was believed by a Western conservative like Edmund Burke, but also by the Russian Slavophile movement, that if a government has to use force to impose its laws, then the laws aren't legitimate. This is why the Slavophiles had a very, very negative view of the Petersburg monarchy. to them it was the you know they could focus on foreign policy but everything else was done in the commune and in the artel

that itself was a system um you know i've studied in great detail but um uh even they had to deal with people who were just you couldn't deal with them anymore their physical violence is necessary and also at the use of physical violence and if you have to use it a lot You know you're in a lot of trouble. That goes for a state as well as a person. If a state has to constantly use violence to impose its laws, then it really should be wondering, maybe these aren't the right laws.

Or there shouldn't be a state. You know, diversity means that the laws have to become very abstract. It doesn't refer to a specific people anymore. There's no real reason to be loyal to it in that case. But you also have to keep in mind that this use of violence shouldn't, and it often does, change the person using it. And, you know, whether it would be PTSD or some other form of mental problem that comes from the absolutely necessary use of physical violence.

The person might be good. The end might be good. It might be clearly delineated evil, which you did have in the rest of the Civil War and other things. And yet, some of those soldiers come back. And despite all of that are not the same, men, they've been negatively impacted. There's nothing anyone can do about it. But that's the nature of the beast. So that's why, that's one reason out of many, that violence shouldn't be used, should only be used as an absolute last resort.

Because it does change. It doesn't get to the inner source of the problem, the criminal, with the evil entity. it also can turn a good guy into a bad guy very quickly. This means that physical coercion, firstly, should not attempt to evoke knowledge, recognition, acceptance, conviction, belief, or confession in a person's soul. Any such attempt is doomed to failure. At best, it forces to coerce person onto the path of hypocrisy. At worst, it undermines the very capacity for conviction in faith and perhaps extinguishes this capacity altogether, spiritually crippling the person.

Prisons, torture, and executions are powerless to move the soul toward discernment, conviction, and faith. They can only lead it to either betrayal or stubbornness, which culminates in martyrdom, which is far from being meaningful. Physical coercion must, under all circumstances, preserve a person's sense of truth without suppressing his sense of his own spiritual dignity or shaking his self-confidence. This is why all forms of physical coercion, destroy a person's mental health and spiritual strength must be condemned and rejected such as the

deprivation of food, sleep, backbreaking work, torture, imprisonment with career criminals, humiliation, etc. And this is something for one of the most right-wing writers of the 20th century to say. He may not be talking about the American prison system. This is what happens all over the place. with career criminals. I love how that's a, and I checked it, I double checked it, I triple checked it. That's exactly what he says here. You know, you come out of prison, at least in America, far worse than you went in because you had to conform to that reality. But it's sort of like

what he's trying to say, if you have, if you're beating somebody in his prison cell, And you're saying this is done in the name of Christ. What's you going to think? He's going to associate Christ with this beating and hate him from there on in. That's why he says it should not evoke any kind of knowledge or legitimacy. It should just be. It's done because it has to be done. That's why it's doomed to failure.

And the hypocritical element are that people will just do things correctly just because they have to, not because it's in their soul to do. This is what he means by hipart. That's a real definition of hypocrisy, saying or doing something they don't actually believe just to get by. Or like a politician, you know, depending on his audience. So this is a pretty extraordinary thing for a guy like Yelian to say. And it can only come from a Russian, I think, because, you know, they're reluctance to build a prison system. They're aware of what prison systems could do, what they end up.

being. A European civilization didn't have a prison system its entire existence until roughly, what, the end of the 19th century. And that has to be explained. Secondly, physical coercion should not attempt to compel a person to feel love. That is personal devotion, party allegiance, consent to marriage, fidelity, or patriotism. Any such attempt is doomed to failure. At best, the person being coerced will embark on a path of lies. At worst, their soul will be imbued with contempt and hatred for the one coercing them and the things being forced upon them, hardening to the point of being completely incapable of love. Prison's torture and execution chambers cannot evoke either love or fidelity in the soul.

Love is either voluntary and sincere or it is not. Therefore, physical coercion must, under all circumstances, preserve a person's capacity for love, seeing it as a fundamental transformative force of life and spirit. I couldn't help it. But when I was working on this paragraph, I was thinking of the guy, a man, usually you see him quite often. With a very beautiful woman,

he's terrified. The woman could go with someone else. So he does a lot of mate guarding. He stays very close to her. It's like when she looks over there. It gets jealous at the tiniest thing. You know, after a while, she's going to say, I'm with a, you know, I can't be with this guy anymore. It's very unattractive.

Love is either voluntary and sincere or it's not. She's going to cheat. She's going to cheat. And you grabbing her by the hand isn't going to change that. You have these lunatic criminals who you keep, you know, partners locked up in a room. Please love me, you know, as if that could ever work. And they may even say it just for the sake of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, getting out of it, getting out of the situation. Now, that's an individual level, but that's what I was thinking of when I translated this, this notion that you can force love out of a person. Physical coercion just has to be. Love is a completely separate thing.

You know, a woman you're with, if they aren't satisfied by you anymore and they're going to treat, there's nothing you can do. I don't care how close you hold her or how angry you get when she looks at someone else. she's going to find a way to leave and to cheat. That's what I was thinking of the whole time I was right. And this paragraph in particular. This is why all forms of physical coercion that harden a person and bitter him and turn him into a blind hater and avenger must be condemned and rejected. Rude, insulting treatment, depriving a prisoner of all signs of love and attention, not allowing religious services and a spiritual father, supplying him with misanthropic literature, torture and corporal punishment, and so much else.

while they're just describing Israel, he's just describing the future state of Israel. Yeah, there has to be, always has to be a legitimate way, you know, it can never be excessive, but only,

only in the sense that it has to have a very clear purpose. These kind of treatments are going to just harden the person into the hatred they already have. It's not going to do anything. And these guys get released out into society again after things like this. You know, allowing religious services and a spiritual thought.

It's very important. You know, what was the bread and water diet all about? It was a way that bread and water allowed with a strict fasting rule. And strict fasting allows the brain really to be freed and to be able to think about the crimes that they've committed. It's not to torture the guy. It's to, it's to, you know, anatomically speaking, to permit the brain to function without being weighed down by, by heavy foods. That's why we fast. It's the whole point of it. Now, now, it's really hard, it's really hard to defend the American prison system, although it would be impossible to reject the necessity of the American

prison system. A lot of people who don't have a lot of alternatives. You know, there has to be a way out for these people. You know, and the use of physical violence has to, you know, he's sort of violating another principle, but it has to have at least sense that the person who's suffering it knows why it's being done. But it's something that maintains his humanity. and he sees that the good of the people who are using the violence aren't really all that bad and they're doing this because they have to

they're making them do it and that might be that might be successful but the American prison system the very fact that there's nonviolent people in prison doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever but you also have nonviolent people being put in in state prisons with some of the worst

criminals out there. And what happens to them, you know, we all know what happens to them. Unless I have money. And this satisfies absolutely nobody. This does no one any good. And if anything, there is hate the system a million times more. Any system. This is why, you know, the Russian monarchy was still based on basic medieval principles,

which is a very good thing. capital crimes were punished by for the most part execution after a trial and everything otherwise it was done

through fines or having to work for the person and then its family of course family meant a lot more back then the extended family

had to come up with the money for the fines that's how it worked you didn't need a prison system for that and this is

where you know it's almost impossible and the prison system creates a much tougher, more hardened criminals, or people who, even PTSD can't explain what they're going through or what they've been through. It does nothing good for them. There's nothing good for anybody.

Finally, physical coercion appealing directly not to spirituality and love, but to the human will, and moreover, with the demand for self-compulsion and self-coercion, must preserve the human capacity for willing, but on the contrary, strengthening it and facilitating its spiritual development. Any form of coercion that corrupts the will makes its own goals unattainable and meaningless. It is not to reduce him to a complete incapacity for volitional self-governance and thereby permanently turn him into an object suppressed. This is why all forms of physical coercion that damage and do not strengthen a person's will must be condemned. Forced idleness, meaningless work, the hopelessness of a life sentence, dehumanizing punishments, etc.

Again, you have another list from the most right-wing Russian, probably the most Russian right-wing Russian writer of the 20th century. And it makes a lot of sense. It comes from the very mentality of the old Tsar's system. You know, punishment has to maintain the dignity of the dignity of the person, if there's dignity there in the first place, but we assume that there's dignity there, and they have to know that it respects their dignity. And the punishment is their own fault. It's kind of like you spank someone and you, a kid and you say, this hurts me more than it hurts you. It's that mentality now on a public scale. And, you know, these lists are really important because he was kind of, you know, force idleness is what, you know,

God, the American prison system, what a waste of manpower. You know, meaningless work, well, that's most of humanity. And, yeah, life sentences, well, in certain cases, we understand why that's imposed. But people with a life sentence don't have to have any dignity anymore. There's no programming for them. They're never going home. so there has to be reason has to dominate physicality can never be

dominated by passion no matter how good the person is or how good the system is or how good the goals are but reason has to dominate and in the moment that could be very difficult you know like for example El Salvador the country was falling apart the economy was crashing

people weren't leaving their homes because the gangs had gone so large. They took chunks of the country to themselves. What's the government supposed to do? The normal system, it was like in Colombia,

back when Escobar was alive, judges had to wear a mask. You know, this is why. You know, when a military takes power, for example, they give a list, here's why we're doing this. We don't want to do it. We're doing this because of all of this.

And this is why we use the violence that we use. And, but this now this is a third list he's given here of things that are done to individuals, you'd say in a prison environment, that really point directly to the American prison system today. And frankly, I don't think the Russian,

old Russia ever had a prison system at all. There was a piece, sort of a part of the beginning of it before war started. A lot of it was mental institutions like Ward No. 6 by Chekhov. But the monarchy never was comfortable with the prison system. It's because it engaged in all of these lists, the things that he's listing here. Now, in a different context, you would say this is a leftist talking. You're a typical Republican. But you're not understanding the context of saying all of this here.

Now, it implies, it assumes that there is dignity to be had. I mean, it's possible there's people with such a low IQ that, I don't know, you know, the word dignity doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Or the criminal who just can't do anything else. But that's probably a minority. But if there's dignity to be had, these sorts of things, although he's what, 10, 12 things that he's listed here are just going to make things worse. And he's pointing to what in the future would become the American prison system, especially

at the state level. This already clarifies the limit at which physical coercion and restraint become meaningful and permissible. It cannot evoke either reason, love, or spiritually holistic, positive action, much less a moral religious transformation of the soul. wherever these forces and abilities live act and govern a person it is unnecessary and unacceptable wherever a person works to acquire the virtues and love and maintains self-control where the power of spiritual and volitional self-governance is intact within a person and where the principles of honor

and duty reside within their soul the individual should thus cultivate himself through the power of self-compulsion and self-restraint where the soul is not possessed by criminality and malice and even where simply mental coercion, simple mental coercion emanating from other people prove sufficient. The question of physical coercion and restraint should either not be raised at all or should be resolved negatively. Yeah. Well, the simplest way to understand this is that physical violence, any kind of coercion,

is the very last resort. There's a million other things to do before that. and if they fail for whatever reason and you have someone who's incorrigible, then you have no choice in the matter. I guess in the U.S. system you have, you know, first offenses. It kind of a slap on the wrist for certain things, but you keep doing it, and off to the state prison, you go. But it all comes down to the fact that, you know, in Plato's mind,

and this was adopted by great things like Justin Martyr, aestheticism is about reason dominating passion in the soul I know that there's a lot of anger and violence you know slaughter of people

invasion or something like that and that's true in the moment but overall there has to be this control over the violence has to be it can't just be a mass slaughter

um uh all that's going to do is ruin the people who are doing the mass slaughter and then making them hated by their enemy. So, you know, above he says that we just read that violence should not try to give information. He must be saying that in a different sense because clearly the whole rest of this list,

he's sort of saying it should. There should be a mentality behind it. the extreme example I use is definitely out, you know. You can't have someone associate being beaten with the church. That's terrible. You know, he's going to associate those two things and end up hating you forever, assuming he's a normal human being. So the basic notion is, well, even more basic,

is that if the society is healthy, the whole question of physical violence should be a rare one. Unfortunately, we don't have that luxury today. That was the case in all Russia for a long time, except for the upper levels of the mobility. But we didn't have a healthy society for the most part. I'd like to point out that Iran, prior to the war, had the lowest, or one of the lowest suicide rates,

in the world. There's something about that kind of system and that kind of education that provides a sense of dignity and duty. There has to be a reason for that. You know, in the Third Reich, South Korea under General Park,

you had this tremendous belief. Oh my God, we're blossoming again. Everyone has to do their part. Not a whole lot of coercion is necessary there. Everyone can see it around them. that things are just, you know, a lot of optimism there. So in a healthy society, this should only be an issue once in a while, but we don't live in a healthy society.

And so this question becomes far more complicated, even than Eileen understood it at the time. I think this is the last paragraph, and then he's going to, there should be enough to wrap up the chapter for the next episode. I agree. Yeah. also, yeah, he, he starts jumping into applicability. That's right.

While appeals to virtue and love or to the rational volitional principle of man do their job, and insofar as they do, physical coercion and suppression should not take place, remaining, as it were, in reserve, for they form precisely a substitute and replenishing reserve for the main fighting force. It is clear that these means, fulfilling the function of a reserve, must be ready in a certain proximity to the internal means of struggle and subordinate to them. Moreover, unlike a military service, they must be known in advance to the receiver as a threat and sanction and must always be introduced into battle in a very measured and gradual way

so that the dose of physical coercion is always individually adapted and not excessive, neither in terms of the form of punishment nor in terms of its duration. Well, even in a healthy society, good citizens realize that the laws are their own. This is very hegelian. The laws reflect who they are, and they are part of a people. They're part of a nation. They see themselves in others. They're not strangers.

There is still the possibility of coercion if things start to fall apart. there's no way that could be the the main motive of of of being it's not rationality it's simply it's simply going along so you don't get killed or sent to prison or something like that that's not reason but when the laws agree with reason as you have in plato as you have in hagel and as you have an old rush I mean it has to have a specific application role Russia is a great example of Serbia under Emperor Douchon is another example People had a purpose, people had a mission, people had a class That had its own Sets of Rights and Duties That you're born into, it makes a lot of sense

So clearly they don't have the endless Got the mental issues Everyone in their mother has today I think to a great extent comes from this drive to individualism Except that the individual doesn't matter but, you know, he's using a military metaphor, but he's not really talking about military, and he's not talking about armies at all.

He's just using that as a metaphor. It's always there, and it has to be there. But I think one of the hidden subtexts of what we've read in this episode is that there always has to be someone that does the physical violence. does the beatings that, you know, that person can't be ruined by doing it. Solders coming back from war, no, how just their cause, you know, they come back erect.

And so it ends up being very complex. And sometimes you can't, you just can't help it. That's the nature of warfare. Although I do think that was less the case than Vietnam and afterwards. So the dose of physical coercion individually adapted. That's the key thing. And that's saying a lot. That's saying a mouthful.

That's very hard to do. You have to have a rational society in present to begin with for that to even be considered. People go to prison. You know, why am I obeying the law? I pay taxes because I'm forced to pay taxes. I don't want to go to prison. That's why. Not because I want to assist the government.

and what it's doing, because it reflects me. Two very different things. And that's the subtext of everything that's been going on and what we've been reading here. All righty, wrap it up there. Finish this chapter out on the next episode. As I do at the end of every episode, I'm going to encourage everybody to go over to the show notes,

donate to Dr. Johnson's work, pick up his new book, join his Patreon, yada yada, go support what he does. Please. Yeah. Yeah. Please do. And that, absolutely. And that's it.

I'll talk to you in a couple days, Dr. Johnson. Thank you. All right, my friend. I'll see you then. I want to welcome everyone back to our reading of Unresistance to Evil by Force by Ivan Eileen. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today? You know, when I lived in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, I was getting my house repainted. and it was I wanted a lighter, you know, sagey kind of green.

And I was looking through the names, not the colors, but the names for the accent color. And I saw a foxy. And I said, oh, I want that one. You said, don't you want to see it? I said, no. No, I picked it just solely because of the name. And it turned out to be like a red, you know, reddish color. It worked well.

but I saw Foxy. I said that's the one I want. So that's how I pick house colors, you know, if the name appeals to me. I think my wife would certainly disagree with you. You sure you don't want to take a look at it? No.

All righty. We got a couple pages left in this chapter. so I'm going to start reading. Physical coercion is fundamentally applicable when and to the extent that a person's inner self-control fails and there are no spiritual and mental resources to restrain and stop their antisocial actions. This means that the threshold at which physical action becomes necessary is determined negatively. This threshold is the spiritual inadequacy of the person being educated and the spiritual

vulnerability of the educator. Clearly, these two dimensions are not only jointly, not only jointly established the limited permissibility and necessity, but also, to a significant degree, mutually determine each other. Thus, the lesser the spiritual inadequacy of the person being educated, the greater the spiritual potential for influencing them, and, accordingly, the further the threshold at which physical action is necessary is pushed. On the other hand, the educator has even less grounds to cite the objective absence of spiritual and mental resources, and an inappropriate reference to this absence directly reveals their own inadequacy. Vice versa, the more corrupted, malicious, and aggressive the person being punished is,

the sooner an objective lack of spiritual and cognitive resources can be revealed, and the sooner even an executor can give up. Yeah, the executor, not, I'm not talking about executions, just someone who brings it about, the executive branch, the implementation, you know. I struggle with the word educator. That's the word he uses. And he seems to deny that earlier in the book, that physical coercion should not have any intellectual or religious or the actual act itself in the process of it. And I think I use the example of beating someone with an icon of Christ right in front of him. So then he'll associate Christianity with being beaten. I think he meant it in a very specific way.

But there has to be – he's talking about very ignorant. He's talking about people that we deal with every day. Back in grad school, I had many discussions. on the question whether or not natural law can be completely eliminated from a human being to the point where there is simply no hope

outside of a miracle. You know, and I cited, you know, prison documentaries. You see some of these guys being put in solitary because even in prison, they're uncontrollable. They're in prison. because they were uncontrollable.

Is it, you know, is it possible that someone could reach that level? Outside of a, but, you know, now he's here, he's talking about physical coercion as in and of itself a form of education. But the threshold that you says, yes, is at least in part based on the ignorance of the person being educated. There's some people who, there's nothing, you know, nothing more irritating than someone who's both arrogant and ignorant. Sometimes I envy those people, you know, who could know nothing and they don't know that they don't know anything. And so they're very, very self-assured, you know.

And that's something along the lines of what he's talking about here. In other words, maybe they really are incapable of reason, partially what I mean by natural law. enhance freedom. They can't have, they're incapable of autonomy. They're incapable of a free act based on a real, rational and cognitive process. And we know we have people like that, but is it possible to totally eliminate that? And, you know, the American prison system does a pretty good job of that in some people. but I do think it's possible

and you know you can't assume that and it's pretty easy to realize in a conversation when you're dealing with somebody I think you know this pretty quickly that the guys are in ignoramus and because of that reason

may not be the best route to get to him you know, it's this is, you know, he's, he's, and he realizes how difficult this is. The good, those who want to bring about a positive result in society have so many variables to take into consideration. The evil have nothing. They could just do whatever the hell they want. But the good has to be extremely careful. And the evil always have the advantage, at least for that reason, among many others.

But, you know, the more corruptive. malicious and aggressive, the person being punished is, the sooner the objective lack of spiritual and cognitive resources can be revealed. And then the next step, the sooner even an executor, someone who's actually doing the punishing, to simply give up because even that won't have any impact. Now, I don't know if he's talking about mental illness here, where they're simply, they really are incapable of,

they don't live in the real world. or just talking about normal people who are simply evil. And that line, again, is very, very, very difficult. So, you know, the use of physical coercion is necessary in many, on many occasions. And it seems like he's already almost admitting that, yeah, you're going to make mistakes. Nothing's perfect. No system is perfect. No individual is perfect. but as I was translating this reading this I was thinking of a few people popped into my head from many years ago people who I don't think were capable of of any sustained thought whatsoever so getting them to do something you had to have a carrot and stick very obvious carrot and stick in front of them and that's to a great extent what he's talking about here physical influence is permissible

when it is necessary, and it is necessary when mental and spiritual persuasion is insufficient, ineffective, or unrealizable. The conditions that determine the occurrence and presence of such a moment are varied and complex and can hardly be fully listed. These may be, firstly, objective conditions not connected with the personality of the person being coerced, nor with the personality of the one coercing, such as are the conditions of time, space, and scope of influence. The shorter the time given for influence or for prevention, the shorter the period of time. The more immediate the action, for example, one moment before a shot from a pistol, the greater the distance separating the intervener from the perpetrator. The more extensive the composition of the object of influence,

for example, the need for rapid and energetic influence on a crowd, an army, the population of an occupied territory, the less feasible are internal measures of struggle, the sooner their expediency, perhaps their complete hopelessness is revealed. These may be secondary, subjective conditions associated with either the personality of the person being coerced or the personality of the coercer. And again, in this case, I think about, you know, policemen, especially inner city policeman. the minute he used that as an example, shot from a pistol, and how their lives are simply impossible right now if they're white. And I know that there are policemen getting killed or beaten because they don't want to shoot.

They don't want to be on the evening news and I protest and everything else. They know what the media is capable of. You know, in certain cases, you simply have to make a decision right away. way you have to be totally stuick about it and that's the end of it whatever happens happens all you know is that it's necessary right now even if it leads to um terrible circumstances later for you personally well you personally that's not the issue here uh we talked last last time about how the regime um romanticizes criminals and criminality all the time especially non-white criminality.

I don't want to talk about IQs or anything like that. Response times and all the rest. But in many cases, there is no internal struggle. You can't sit there and reason it out. You are put in a terrible position right away. And I know I've read about it. Actually, I've read about it in American Renaissance and places like that, a policeman who simply just been shot because they're scared to shoot first,

even though they know that the person is armed, he's of the wrong race. It's an impossible position. And yet the stoic mentality, it seems, that you do your duty regardless of what happens to you as a result. Which is easy to say, us sitting here in our offices. But for someone who chooses that kind of life, you know, they have to be prepared for that kind of thing to happen. Or they themselves will be murdered. Now, I keep using the example of the guy with a kid and the knife.

But we haven't mentioned whether or not the person will just turn around and do it on you. and the minute he turns around you may have a very short period of time to think this through I think in America we have the I don't know I'm sure Alabama is a sandier ground state for home invasion but prosecutors have ripped that apart yeah you're going to be in court for a long time even if you're 100% self-defense and you're going to be in the newspaper

and God forbid there's a difference in races a black guy invades one of our homes, God forbid, that will be on the news, no matter how obviously self-defense it's based on it. You know, you don't have very long to think about it. And God knows you can't quote scripture to the guy

expecting any change in behavior. So there's a lot of examples you could use here. but again, it just shows how absurd Tulsaoy's point of view is, especially in these extreme examples. The lower the general spiritual level of the person being coerced, for example, mental retardation or moral stupidity of a person, ignorance, illiteracy, drunkenness of the masses, upbringing in a religion of cruelty and hatred, weakness of legal consciousness and patriotic feeling in the country, the stronger the person's obsession. for example, the violence of a madman, mass psychosis, or his evil will. For example, the cruelty of a career criminal. The sooner the critical moment may arrive, weakening all mental and spiritual means as such. Finally, the more mentally helpless, such as a deaf mute, a foreigner does not speak the language,

or spiritually disarm the person coercing, such as a pedagogical inexperienced, the uncalled-for leader, the impotence of the government in the absence of public opinion, incorruptibility and honest press in the country, the more difficult it is for him to wage to struggle by purely spiritual means. How many times have I said, this could have been written yesterday. Problems are exactly the same. You know, they make the argument, the left makes the argument that a huge percentage of those in state prison for violent crimes are mentally ill.

and my answer to that is no kidding, you know, because I have committed these acts. But I absolutely love his examples. Ignorance, drunkenness, upbringing in a religion of cruelty and hatred. You know, Talmudism is probably what he's referring to that. I don't think he's talking about Islam. I mean, I don't think he would have experienced that at all. you know and then of course interestingly the the the impetus of the government now natural law is is very clear and I think there's no society in the universe that rejects this notion that if the government cannot or will not

protect you and your property you have to do it yourself and of course in America that will be punished I don't know. I mean, I remember back in 92, the rooftop Koreans, some of my favorite people on the planet, they were arrested for breaking into the gun shop across the street and the fact that they were successfully protecting

their stores, really from an ethnic point of view. This is Korea town. You know, the left was outraged with them. They probably had been conscripted. served in the South Korean Army at one point. They knew what they were doing. And in fact, they stopped whatever the rioters were doing

at that point. Impetence of the government, no question. And, you know, honest press, all of these stories, and we all know what I'm talking about, are lying about. White comp shoots a black guy. The press says he's doing it for no reason.

He shows a picture. this third grade graduation picture or something like that to inflame public opinion and you have to go to one of our journals to get the real story what actually happened

and you know their love their love that left for the left in general their love for the violent criminal it's a certain type of violent criminal you know

that's something I've considered for a long time but the impotence of the government could be, you know, deliberate or indelibre. But I also think of something like Shays Rebellion. Now, I'm right here, Shays Rebellion was in Massachusetts. Whiskey Rebellion was right here where I live. And over fairly small increases in taxation, that would benefit the wealthy, you know, they shot the taxman no problem.

I mean, to the extent where George Washington had to get out of, retirement to fight them. I mean, ultimately, that's where, right after the, right after the Revolutionary War ended. And that they were immediately ready to form militias and take violent action. It was inconceivable today what was considered normal at the founding generation. Of course, there was ethnic concerns. I spent a lot of time actually on the anti-federal. and Shea's Rebellion and Whiskey Rebellion, the Freeze Rebellion.

But this is a situation where rather than government impotence, they're talking about government overreach. And the only way to deal with that was with violence. And there's a reason that no one knows about these rebellions. You know, specialists know about them. But otherwise, we ask someone, give me your opinion on Shea's rebellion. They don't know what the heck you're talking about. about. Back in 2020, they were going to defund the police and essentially for law enforcement.

The law enforcement they were going to use, you know, psychologists who got to wage the struggle, as he says, by purely spiritual means. I can't, you know, I can't imagine. And they don't, in certain places, they did. You know, the Detroit Police Department was cut in half, even though it's overwhelmingly black, over the years, the LAPD has been less than half, as it was in 92. So the point is,

the context of all this is extremely important. We're dealing with somebody, you know, especially if someone you don't know, who may be drunk, who may be mentally ill, that's what I mean by retarded. A Talmudist who doesn't know anything but cruel to your hatred. And no one's going to come and support you because of the lack of patriotic feeling in the country.

So, you know, I think the Shagrebellion is is extremely important to bring up. I love talking about it because it fits in perfectly here. The government was raising taxes. that the Federalist wealthy get their money on war bombs and they wouldn't have it. They were hanging people.

You know, something that was, again, inconceivable today. And in this case, they weren't even talking about whether the, you know, their opponents were not illiterate. They were not ignorant. They were not, you know, retarded. It was simply a government overreach.

But the fact that he used, you know, lack of an honest press, where the normies really do think that white cops shoot, you know, black people for no reason all the time. We're at a point now where we can't wage the struggle by purely spiritual means. We don't even speak the same language anymore. We seem to have mass mental illness. talk about weakness of legal consciousness you know lack of patriotic feeling

you know we can go on and on about why your position is extremely difficult I always reminds me of that couple do you remember them during in 2020 riots in St. Louis that the guy comes out with an M16 and she had a pistol because the

the mob had gone out you remember them The mob had left the city and had gone out into the suburbs deliberately. And they were going to start. They were destroying things. They didn't shoot anybody. They made sure, though, that they knew that we were armed. And they were arrested.

And if it wasn't for the fact that they had a Republican governor who would have pardoned them, no matter what to happen, it would be. So even taking action, even symbolic action to defend yourself was frowned upon there. The rooftop Koreans were arrested, and it wasn't just for breaking into the gun shop. So, again, this isn't necessarily, you know, impotence of the government. It's a deliberate impotence of the government. It's a system where they're, it's designed now not to defend you. So therefore, you have to do it yourself and you get in trouble for it.

all of us should really be worried if we were in a position. I mean, I think of poor James Fields every day, I don't know how he's doing it. He just wanted to get home. And I watched the video when it was first aired. Some of them had guns pointed at him. And, you know, he was going like 20 miles an hour and someone had a heart attack and therefore he's in prison for the rest of his life.

You know, when it comes to something like that, there is no legal protection. Natural law has no presence there. It's a completely arbitrary system at this point, especially for people like God. Waging it by purely spiritual means? Well, that only then applies to a certain sensitive person who actually is legitimately seeking the truth.

Ah, that person we can work with. What's the percentage in the population? I don't know. It is impossible to establish here once and for all, any single meaningful criterion for an infallible solution to the problem in specific historical situations. It is possible that a spiritually strong, wise, and experienced man will continue the spiritual struggle where a spiritually weak and experienced an unwise person will be inclined to admit that spiritual means have been exhausted, but the opposite is also possible,

namely that a spiritually strong and insightful person will turn to the sword where a weak, short-sighted or a foolish person will still try to persuade and argue. Yeah, they'll persuade and argue, let's say in a healthy society and something terrible happens. They will persuade and argue only because they, and that could be someone on our side. You know, foolish short-sight. We have plenty of short-sighted and foolish people on our side.

We'll do that just precisely so. They don't have to take any further action. He can't blame them half the time. But he's getting into the concept of self-defense here and all the criteria that impinges on this historically, socially, and in your mind and the person being coerced mind. And so he comes right out and says it. It's impossible to establish a single meaningful criterion. There is no infallible solution. and the only chance we have is that spiritually strong, wise, experienced man,

continuing the battle and doing what we have to do regardless of the consequences. The fight against evil is a living process, a very complex one, in which evil always presents itself in the form of a singular, individual, or social phenomenon. The task of the struggler is always to objectively comprehend the nature of a given phenomenon and find appropriate means to overcome it. Participating in this struggle, each person must act according to their own best judgment, driven by love, trusting their spirit, and relying on their observation, and no one acting in this way can consider themselves immune from possible error, oversight, failure,

and harm. Impulse control is a big part of this. We know there's a connection between IQ and impulse control. at anything that we may do defend ourselves you have to be very careful about impulses you have to be very careful about allowing the emotion of the moment

the adrenaline of the moment to take over from your reason that's extremely difficult to do he's not talking about soldiers on a battlefield he's talking about social life here and the evil always have that advantage. They're sociopathic. They don't have to worry about right and wrong.

They don't have to worry about anything. They could simply do what they need to do. I mentioned the Russian Civil War before. The Red Army did things to maintain unity that the White Army couldn't even conceive of. Very harsh punishments. You know, they'd rather lose me. men then

shoot them then lessen their cohesiveness. That's one of the reasons they won. The extreme levels of violence that they would take to, even not on their own men as well as on an occupied area. Again, something the whites couldn't conceive of. And it's unfortunate that that is one of the

many reasons that the whites lost. Being virtuous means that there's a certain delay in your response time. For a sociopath, it doesn't matter. So I think of this all the time when it comes to, you know, policemen, especially in the inner city, have to follow a procedure, a set of rules, a long list of things,

have to worry about media and everything else. And your non-white criminal doesn't worry about a damn thing. they could do whatever they please. They don't have to worry about standards. And it's automatically an unequal fight. And this is why people get killed. And again, part of why the inner cities are the way they are. For even the most sincere and well-intentioned man is prone to error,

especially when forced to fight with extreme measures. No one is safe from error and harm. Neither he who abstains from the struggle altogether, therefore he certainly does harm by encouraging and indulging, nor he who resists with purely spiritual measures, for, given their possible inappropriateness, he gives the villain freedom of action at the same time profanes and discredits the power and sanctity of spiritual conversion. Do not give what is holy to dogs, Matthew 7, 6. Nor he who resists with external coercion and suppression, for he can overestimate the power of evil

will and underestimate the power of spiritual coercion. All that philosophical research can provide as a criteria for guidance is resisting evil and reduced entirely to a few comparatively formal guidelines. Okay. One, the resistor must develop sensitivity and keenness to recognize evil and distinguish it from phenomena similar in appearance. This is achieved only gradually, only through a long, and moral and religious purification of his soul only through personal and genuine

spiritually meaningful life experience this is unfortunate because you know someone who is thrown into this position it's not their fault you know you know a normal but decent guy goes into the wrong room and sees what I you know that guy with the knife going on and what do I do Do I kill the guy? You know, I'm armed. Do I kill the guy? What if you kill, you know?

And, you know, how fast the brain processes this. But they have no experience in it. And it's not just your own personal experience. It's like the tough cop. It's been around a long time. But also your mental state. The very fact that we have to recognize evil and distinguish it from phenomena with similar in appearance.

Well, this is one of the things that evil does. It dresses up in other people's clothes. An angel of light, as a Bible says. So that's a, you know, and they're very good at that. Doctrines that sound good on paper, but are extremely destructive in practice. But those resisting evil, yeah, you know, me and you've been doing this for a very long time. We're not talking about violence here necessarily, but at this point, we know who can be reached and who can't be. We've heard it all. I know every single one of their arguments.

Actually, I could make them better than they can, which is a good position to be, and as Dostoevsky would say. But that even lowers the number of men who have that can fight. and it's a very daunting prospect, especially for a young man. And this is why you have to have a master of someone, Obi-Wan-type guy to bring you through the early stages. And, of course, have the proper religion that you could purify your soul this way and have the mentality that God will, you know, God wills, whatever he wills, but I still have to take action against evil,

including violent action of absolutely necessary. So just in this one, one guideline here, we have an extremely complex set of variables. Two, the resistor must strive to understand the paths and laws by which the process proceeds. The life of evil in human souls, as well as all the techniques for its internal overcoming, developed by great righteous men and ascetics. Only those who master these laws and these techniques will be able to correctly resolve all the current issues of social education.

So he's talking about a lot of different things. In this case, we're not talking about, you know, shooting somebody. We're talking about our own soul. We're talking about, you know, protecting ourselves. And how does evil work? You know, we could explain it to people. You could explain it in great detail. You know, we know that the left functions almost exclusively.

by deceit and violent. Liberalism, leftism, Marxism, they always have to be imposed at the barrel of a gun. We know their lies by now. Just because it's on a piece of paper doesn't mean it's true. Now asceticism is really important that kind of discipline

because that makes you free. That allows you to see things for what they are. you know the concept of autonomy versus freedom autonomy is is to is to will the correct thing

without either internal or external force versus freedom we should just do whatever you want so long as you don't hurt somebody two very different things autonomy comes from cynicism

freedom just comes from our animal impulses if you want. And the term is very abused right now. But, you know, he just, it's just an understatement. Only those who master these laws and these techniques would be, you know, that's a huge, huge statement there. Today, because evil has become so dominant, they aren't disguising themselves. Michael Hoffman taught us all about the revelation of the method came from the Rosicrucians in the 18th century. that evil when it exposes itself and takes action, not even disguising itself, and nothing happens to them, ah, they know that they win.

They've dominated us. I remember thinking after the 2008 meltdown and the taxpayers were forced to bail out all of these major banks. and I say, you know, if nothing happens here, they're coming right out and saying we're bailing out these banks. They may have foreclosed on your house, but we're also forcing you to pay to bail them out because they're in trouble now. And of course, nothing did happen.

No one even talks about it anymore. They weren't hiding it. We see this many times. They're not hiding it anymore. And it is a huge risk for them, by the way, we see what happens in Gaza that was a huge risk and it backfired but the example of the bailouts

that's what was very important nothing happened taxpayers were forced to bail these people out as they were foreclosing on your house nothing happened as a result but you know of course she was living in a very different society than we do

he was living in a far more healthy society than we do When choosing measures and means in the struggle, the resistor must always mentally begin with spiritual means, descending to external measures of struggle only insofar as spiritual means prove unrealistic, ineffective, or insufficient. And even when the need for physical force becomes clear that from the very beginning, the resistor must remember that the measure is not independent, but secondary, subordinate, and extreme. God forbid, anyone listening to? to this has to come to this in this situation.

In many cases, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. As a white male, any action taken to defend yourself is going to be looked at differently than anyone else. No, in some cases, it's obvious. You're dealing with the psycho. You know, you can't quote the Psalms to them. That's not going to work. therefore if he turns his gaze on you you may you may have to defend yourself with with with your pistol your rifle whatever you have and many of us realize thank God this never happened hopefully it never will but we know that we're going to spend God knows how many years in court even if we're 100% correct and exonerated we're still going to go broke

defending ourselves from this kind of thing. But the obvious example of the psycho, you know, but there's less obvious examples. And that's where the struggle can be found. That's where the real problem can be found. When resorting to physical force, a resistor must always seek the moment and conditions under which physical force can be used

without harming the spiritual struggle, paving the way for it and thus yielding its place. For when the struggle against evil is waged correct, all countermeasures, from self-indulgence of benevolence to one's personal enemy, to the death penalty for the absolute criminal, existed an internal, organic connection of mutual support and subordination to a single goal. And that goal is a healthy and just society. Whether it be the proper arrangement of your soul, as Plato would say,

or of forces in the state, it's basically the same thing. You know, when the struggle of evil is weighed correctly. Well, that's a big win there. And now he uses two examples that are very important, are personal enemies. Even when we've been wronged personally, especially if they're a member of the church,

we have to be as apologetic as possible, outside of violence, of course. But then he moves it to the state, the death penalty, the medieval's. And I think most rational people support the death penalty under certain conditions. That is done quickly, not like it's done today. you know people people talk about that the capital punishment doesn't work doesn't deter crime

said well it's it's you have first degree murder conviction of first degree murder they're not given a death penalty it was automatic for that or automatic for certain kinds of paedophilia that was the automatic

punishment would be a different story and also that it wouldn't it wouldn't take 40 years for it again to you, then we could talk about whether or not it worked. But theoretically speaking, the death penalty is the removal of a gangrenous limb from your body. And that's how you have to view these things. I first came across that in Thomas Aquinas. But in all the church fathers, you have some variation of this. The Russians had had a problem with the death penalty for a long time, even in the Tsarist era.

but if you have a gangrenous limb that's going to infect your whole body, you have no choice but to amputate it. And that's what the death penalty is for society. These people have declared war on society and therefore have declared war on you. And the medieval conception of penal law was, you know, you didn't have a prison system. So either you had execution or the family had to pay huge fines or you had to do work, you know, do become a serve for the person who you've wrong, whatever it is, or replace what you've taken, et cetera. That was pretty much it. Only modernity, only really, only post-modernity has required a prison system that, I'm not sure what the alternative is today right now in 2020. But no one can think that's, I mean, it should be a huge deterrent to crime.

But then again, we're also talking about people who with no impulse control who aren't thinking about that at the time a crime is committed. Or they think that they're so smart that they're going to get away with it. So, you know, any act of violence, the state or the person, has to be done not because you're angry. Of course you're going to be upset. No reason has to dominate it. And you're doing it because you want to bring about a healthy society. You know, I used the example a few months ago, spanking your kid.

You do something that drives you crazy. You don't spank them because you're pissed about it. That's wrong. You spank them because you want that to end. That has to be your motivation. has to be irrational motivation, not an emotional one. Five. The resistor must constantly examine the true internal sources and motives of his personal

struggle with evil in the confidence that the objective comprehension of the evil being overcome and the mastery of the spiritual technique of struggle and the choice of means and the implementation of the struggle itself depend on this. Moreover, he must be sure that his personal rightness and steadfastness in resistance depend on this, that in the final analysis, this determines victory or defeat? You have to be in a position to meet out that kind of punishment on a personal level. You see, and she comes all the time. You know, a teenage guy comes to take out the teenage daughter and the father gets all mad, you know, you better not.

and I always say to myself, he's going to do what you did just a few years ago with other girls' daughters. How can you possibly condemn him for wanting to do or doing the exact same thing? You can't do that. You have to be righteous first. And it's not merely the state,

but also those who work for the state in the political side of things. So again, evil doesn't have to be. have to worry about any of this. Organized crime has to worry about this a little bit, but in terms of evil in general, they have no standards. And so these are extremely complex things. These five guidelines, and I chose that word deliberately. They're not laws, you know, like the canons in the church. They're not laws in the sense that the penal laws of Pennsylvania are laws. their guidelines.

These guidelines have developed because through spiritual experience, the people who wrote them down know exactly what they're talking about. And this list of five things may summarize a lot of what we've done up until this point. And that's why I actually list them with numbers. because I think this is extremely important. So what he's going to do, he said the first four to not raise any doubts, but everything established above.

However, the fifth rule is the issue, the state of your soul as you resist evil. That's a different story. and it's hard to punish somebody for things that you just did a few years ago, you know, in family life, for example. So I think these five, this summarized a lot of what we've done up at this point. One last sentence. If the first four rules should not raise any doubts after everything established above, then the fifth rule still requires in-depth analysis and justification. Yeah, I think this is a great place to end it.

You could, you know, people who are reading this should read and reread these five things and see where you personally stand in any of this stuff. How do we go about fixing it? Because none of us are perfect in any of these things. God forbid, we're put in that terrible position that we've been talking about. But cops in the inner city, they're putting that position

in every single night, and we know what can happen to them. And no one gives them, you know, James Fields, any of these situations, God forbid, anyone listening to this has to deal with this. But as things get worse and worse, the chances of us having to deal with it are, you know, they go up. And so I spent a lot of time in translating these five things, made a numbered list out of it. and I think this is extremely important for anyone who cares about this topic. All righty.

I will encourage everybody to go over to the show notes and to donate to Dr. Johnson's work by his latest book, sign up for his Patreon, or send them a one-off. And, yeah, we'll be back in a few days with another episode. Thank you, Dr. Johnson. Appreciate you. Thank you, my friend. I appreciate you too.