The Pete Quiñones Show - Reading Ivan Ilyin's 'On Resistance to Evil by Force' w/ Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson - Pt. 18

Episode Date: July 18, 2026

40 MinutesPG-13Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson is a researcher, writer, and former professor of history and political science, specializing in Russian history and political ideology.Pete and Dr. Johnson continue a 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.

With election time approaching political ads will be inserted into the episode along with other ads that, frankly, I'm not going to like and you aren't going to like. So please ignore them, skip by them, whatever you have to do. I don't endorse any of the ads that are inserted, but it is another way for me to generate income. So I appreciate you guys putting up with them. If you don't want to deal with them, go to the Picanuona Show.com. can subscribe through Patreon. You can subscribe through Substack, which is my preferred one. Because with both of those, you get an RSS feed, only Patreon and only Substack give you an RSS feed. There's also a link to my website, Gumroad, and SubscribeStar, where you will get

the audio files that you can download and listen to or you can stream in most cases through those locations as well. So if you want to avoid the ads, consider supporting the show. If not, just know none of these ads get any endorsement from me. Skip by them. Do what you need to do. I appreciate all of you. Head on over to Pekignona Show.com. You can get the show early and ad free over there. If not, here's a show. 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 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 computer. 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. He was my godfather who heard me doing it. 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 and 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 does 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, 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 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 uh j j russo i don't know if he kept it through 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 reason doesn't 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 a 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, um, an orphanage. So they could be, you know, raised by people who know what they were doing. Um, but, um,

this is, you also find this very, it's very healthy idea in Yohan Herder, one of the great founders of nationalism in Germany in the very early, uh, well, late, late 18th century where instinct really does matter you can't reject it you can't fight it

um the instinct to um recognize people like you and um that's not the only basis of the nation of course but um instinct does matter here by the time you get to to the early 19th century instinct matters a lot. And you have the rationalists who reject it entirely, which is a stupid idea, and the super-romantics. I've always been romantic in that regard, who 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, What habits 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 and 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 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 Elyn 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 like you do with your iPhone you can help but feel morally superior to those around you.

You know, what I said, you know, what I said before about going 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 look 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 a told story 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. irresponsibility, spiritual desertion.

While instructing people, that's okay, 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, you know, machine translation is useless in some of these areas. Um, when it gets this, this, 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 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 have all, you know, Orthodox and Catholics, 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? This superficiality that he talks about, I can't help a 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 power, 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 and make no sense. And so 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 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 to 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 Tolstoyans 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 those these ferocious scoundrels to meet with organized resistance and suppression that's what that's what you come up with that that's the final conclusion to this nonsense you know and he's and he's writing this after the uh bolshevik revolution um i'm not sure to what extent this mattered in russia um it was so painful you know i have a paper out

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, it's lazy. And it keeps you from having to do anything, keeps you from having to think very hard. 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 of God. It's a blatant contradiction. This is a huge argument against Tolstoy here. That because it's all God's criminal offending someone, that 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 contolidation 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 describes to God the will to evil and the freedom to commit villainy, moralists apparently failed 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 the huge flaws that I know, because, you know, Tulsa I wasn't a logician by any means.

He was an X-Crow's writer. Excellent. No one denies. I know who 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. It has 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 an 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. has like five or six lines total that he uses and he goes back to him 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 um uh 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. Pilate 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? You know, of course, you know, the Tulsoyan, of course, wouldn't have, when Peter gets his ear chumped off, I'm sorry, when Peter chumps the ear off of somebody else in 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. And, 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, proves religiously blind in his approach to the external world, with its mysterious complexity, its tragedy of division. unity 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 thing. No, people need this simplistic narrative, this simplistic story. You know, and it goes back to what we said from almost in Shulzhenitsen, 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 to teaching of Christ. Yeah, it's, 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. 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 me. 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, it's formed by weakness. 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 a 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 indifference, and the weak will has to see things. relative terms. Do you know it's 94 degrees here? I am, this, my, my air conditioner's having 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 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, one of the men who created the first, um, um, uh, motors that, that, that could power an air conditioner was A.J. the University of 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, it's just 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 the 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 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, you know, I think of people who, even if we're to somehow win and in any battle with the regime, they'll say, oh, we were with you all along, you know. But this line of work is not something we enter into purposely. we're called to it. And it's precisely 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. in that convenience, rather than having been fired from places as a result. That's your job as a professor. And the Tolstoyans 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 to. All right. I think starting another chapter here would be, 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, 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 we got to retool our brains here um so i mentioned it's 94 degrees here you guys down there you mentioned this kind of garbage yeah you're used to it i don't know also everybody who listens now no i have i have an iphone and that um i actually think i'm better than everyone because of it we we assume that i shouldn't you know it's almost a redundancy you know it's you know it's funny i you know 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, 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. 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 a little. 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 um i could uh yeah go fund me maybe i don't know i don't 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 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 our 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 stop my head um um 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.