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

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00:00:57.420 Nietzsche, in particular, predicted what was going to happen in the 20th century.

00:01:14.880 I'm going to read you something that he wrote.

00:01:17.040 I'm going to try to tell you today why the events in the 20th century happened.

00:01:23.480 And so the mass genocidal movements, in particular, which were probably the defining characteristic of the 20th century.

00:01:29.540 And then also, what that has to do with individual psychology.

00:01:34.280 My first degree was in political science, and I was interested in political science because I was interested fundamentally in the reason that human societies went to war.

00:01:42.820 And when I was studying political science, which is quite a long time ago, the fundamental theory that underlie political scientists' explanations for conflict were economic.

00:01:55.000 People fight over resources.

00:01:56.960 And that never seemed reasonable to me because, first of all, obviously, many wars are fought for other reasons than resources.

00:02:04.220 Two Central American countries, I think it was Guatemala and the Honduras, if I remember correctly, went to war over a soccer game.

00:02:13.200 So, the outcome of a... a disputed... the disputed outcome of a soccer game.

00:02:17.720 And even if you do think that the reason that people... groups of people engage in conflict are for economic reasons,

00:02:24.440 that doesn't exactly explain much because that doesn't explain whether they're fighting for...

00:02:30.440 because of absolute differences in wealth or because of relative discrepancies in wealth.

00:02:37.780 And those... those are very, very different causal elements.

00:02:40.100 And then, even if people do fight for economic reasons, which means they're fighting for things that they value,

00:02:45.420 it isn't exactly clear why people value what they value because different societies value different things.

00:02:50.520 So, economics, in the final analysis, ends up being a shallow explanation.

00:02:55.640 And I pursued economic and political and sociological explanations for social conflict for a long time.

00:03:02.380 But eventually, they became untenable to me.

00:03:05.080 And that's partly why I went and studied clinical psychology.

00:03:07.420 Because it struck me that the right level of analysis for understanding mass movements,

00:03:12.420 like the Nazi movement or the ideological possession that characterized the Stalinist Soviets,

00:03:19.820 or Mao's communists, or... or... or... or Paul Potts Cambodian communists,

00:03:26.260 or any of the dictators that you can talk about who were on the far left or the far right during the 20th century.

00:03:32.340 To me, those were failings of individual personality.

00:03:35.880 And the most astute writers that I've ever read,

00:03:39.520 who described what they assumed to be the causes of these terrible conflicts,

00:03:45.400 made the same point, which is why I'm having you read Viktor Frankl and Alexander Solzhenitsyn,

00:03:50.780 because Solzhenitsyn is not generally regarded as a personality psychologist.

00:03:54.020 But he, of all the people I've ever read,

00:03:57.420 he's the one who lays out the connection between the existential failure of the individual

00:04:03.760 and the mass catastrophes of society.

00:04:06.840 And to me, that's too important a link to overlook.

00:04:09.280 And it also strikes me that it's the primary lesson of the 20th century.

00:04:13.740 I mean, one lesson, for example, is beware of ideologies.

00:04:17.620 And the reason I'm going to walk you through Nietzsche and a bit of Kierkegaard today

00:04:21.620 is because these people in the late 19th century, with their antennas up,

00:04:26.440 knew that the collapse...

00:04:28.340 One way of looking at it is the collapse of traditional Western values.

00:04:31.540 That's one way of looking at what set up the preconditions for people's humanity's susceptibility

00:04:39.780 to ideologies in the 20th century.

00:04:42.120 In the 20th century.

00:04:43.040 The other way of looking at it, in some sense,

00:04:45.000 is that as the world came together in the 19th century

00:04:48.180 and ideas were passed around from culture to culture more rapidly

00:04:52.420 than they had ever been passed around,

00:04:54.860 every culture suffered deculturation in some sense.

00:04:58.040 Because if I believe something and you believe something,

00:05:00.520 and there's a long history behind both of our beliefs,

00:05:03.000 when we come into contact,

00:05:05.060 we'll either fight and I'll try to destroy you,

00:05:07.360 or if I don't, if I take you seriously and you take me seriously,

00:05:10.320 then that's going to leave us both wondering exactly what's rock solid underneath us.

00:05:15.200 That's what Nietzsche comments on in this particular quote.

00:05:20.660 Of what is great, one either must be silent or speak with greatness.

00:05:26.180 With greatness.

00:05:28.100 That means cynically and with innocence.

00:05:29.900 What I relate is the history of the next two centuries.

00:05:33.240 I describe what is coming.

00:05:37.200 What can no longer come differently.

00:05:39.400 The advent of nihilism.

00:05:42.840 Nihilism is the belief in nothing.

00:05:46.120 Or the belief that things have no meaning.

00:05:48.940 Our whole European culture is moving for some time now

00:05:51.500 with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade

00:05:55.080 as towards a catastrophe.

00:05:56.500 Restlessly, violently, and headlong like a river that wants to reach the end

00:06:02.140 that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

00:06:07.380 He that speaks here has conversely done nothing so far but to reflect

00:06:11.740 as a philosopher and solitary by instinct

00:06:14.600 who has found his advantage in standing aside, outside.

00:06:20.260 Why has the event, advent of nihilism become necessary?

00:06:27.220 Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence.

00:06:31.960 Because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals.

00:06:37.480 Because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value those values really had.

00:06:42.700 We require at some time new values.

00:06:47.320 Nihilism stands at the door.

00:06:50.220 Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?

00:06:54.980 Point of departure.

00:06:57.800 It's an error to consider social distress or physiological degeneration

00:07:02.540 or corruption of all things as the cause of nihilism.

00:07:06.780 Ours is the most honest and compassionate age.

00:07:09.060 So Nietzsche dispenses right away with sociological explanations

00:07:13.180 for people's lack of belief in meaning in life.

00:07:18.520 You know, and a lot of what you're taught in universities

00:07:21.880 is sociological in its causal thinking.

00:07:26.860 The causal path is often that it's the social conditions that people find themselves in

00:07:31.720 that determine their response to the world.

00:07:33.660 But Nietzsche stands violently against that perspective.

00:07:36.900 And this is 150 years ago, even before, in some sense, it was thoroughly well-developed.

00:07:41.020 And the reason he stands against it is because he points out that

00:07:45.420 wherever you're positioned in society,

00:07:49.640 your position can be made subject to any number of individual interpretations.

00:07:56.740 It's meaning, like the meaning of being poor, say,

00:07:59.740 or the meaning of being comparatively poor

00:08:01.380 isn't a meaning that's etched in stone.

00:08:03.200 And so it has to be interpreted psychologically

00:08:06.760 before it can become a causal factor.

00:08:08.940 And if it can be interpreted psychologically,

00:08:10.380 then it's not a fact like the existence of a mountain is a fact.

00:08:13.700 It's still an interpretation.

00:08:17.360 He says distress itself, whether psychic, psychological, physical, or intellectual,

00:08:23.560 also need not produce nihilism.

00:08:25.660 So he also rejects suffering itself as a cause of nihilism.

00:08:31.220 Need not at all produce nihilism.

00:08:33.040 That is the radical rejection of value, meaning, and desirability.

00:08:36.120 Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations.

00:08:40.020 Rather, it is in one particular interpretation,

00:08:43.760 the Christian moral one, that nihilism is rooted.

00:08:45.860 The end of Christianity at the hands of its own morality,

00:08:50.740 which cannot be replaced, which turns against the Christian God.

00:08:54.460 The sense of truthfulness highly developed by Christianity

00:08:57.200 is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness

00:09:00.120 of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history.

00:09:04.240 It's a rebound from God is the truth

00:09:06.300 to the fanatical faith all is false, an act of Buddhism.

00:09:10.740 So it's a strange interpretation because Nietzsche,

00:09:13.480 although he was violently anti-Christian in his self-presentation to the public,

00:09:22.140 was more like, in my opinion,

00:09:24.840 was more like a beneficial critic of the Western Christian tradition.

00:09:30.920 Because the first thing he realized was that the domination of the West

00:09:35.780 essentially by the Catholic Church for something like 1900 years

00:09:39.520 was necessary in order for the European mind to become trained and focused.

00:09:46.300 So his point was that unless you learn to place an interpretive scheme on the world

00:09:52.620 and interpret that world in a coherent manner through that scheme,

00:09:55.920 you don't have a trained mind.

00:09:58.780 And for Nietzsche, in some sense,

00:10:00.840 it didn't really matter what the interpretive scheme was.

00:10:03.740 It was just that at some point you had to discipline yourself.

00:10:06.920 And this would be something like a post-adolescent process.

00:10:10.020 You had to discipline yourself by developing an adherence

00:10:13.200 to some sort of coherent, deep, coherent view.

00:10:16.880 And the consequence of that, at least in principle,

00:10:19.360 could be that you would be this...

00:10:21.680 You could come to be the sort of person that would be respectful of the truth

00:10:27.200 and also someone who regarded truth as a moral virtue,

00:10:32.940 as a higher-order moral virtue.

00:10:34.880 But then Nietzsche's point was that Christianity developed that sense in Europe

00:10:38.740 to such a degree that the spirit of truth-seeking

00:10:41.460 went after the axioms of Christianity and demolished them.

00:10:44.500 That was his view of what happened during the Enlightenment

00:10:49.140 as a consequence of the interaction between science and religion.

00:10:52.740 So Nietzsche's view was that the modern mind will say,

00:10:58.440 because we're speaking 150 years later,

00:11:00.440 the modern mind had been trained rigorously to interpret things

00:11:04.220 through a coherent structure.

00:11:06.960 And then once that training had occurred,

00:11:09.400 then it could use any number of coherent structures.

00:11:11.960 And then it could also use its ability to form a relationship with the truth

00:11:16.480 to criticize the very thing that gave rise to that mind.

00:11:19.480 And that's Nietzsche's diagnosis of the 20th century individual.

00:11:25.680 The pursuit of truth itself had undermined the structure

00:11:28.700 that gave birth to the pursuit of truth.

00:11:30.600 And that left people wide open.

00:11:32.400 It left them wide open, on the one hand, to nihilism.

00:11:35.280 And nihilism is the belief that nothing has meaning.

00:11:37.880 Nothing has any final meaning.

00:11:39.320 And the best way of expressing nihilism is,

00:11:42.000 what the hell difference is it going to make in a thousand years,

00:11:44.760 what we do today?

00:11:45.740 Or in a hundred years, for that matter?

00:11:47.400 And it's a rational reduction of all of the experiences of life

00:11:53.140 to rational insignificance.

00:11:58.000 Nothing has any final meaning.

00:11:59.920 And so the question, of course, that emerges from that is,

00:12:02.380 well, why do anything?

00:12:03.660 And a deeper question that emerges from that is,

00:12:06.680 well, why bear suffering?

00:12:09.360 But that's not the only problem from an existential point of view,

00:12:13.600 because the existentialists, and Nietzsche as well,

00:12:17.220 also believed that nihilism was actually unbearable.

00:12:20.260 Because people suffer, they have to have a framework of meaning

00:12:24.200 in which to place the suffering,

00:12:26.700 because otherwise it undermines their ability to live,

00:12:29.360 and people can't move forward in that condition.

00:12:33.640 And so another one of Nietzsche's prognostications was that

00:12:37.960 nihilism would produce its counterpart,

00:12:41.200 which was totalitarianism,

00:12:42.400 and people would leap from their immersion,

00:12:44.900 say, in evolutionarily emergent systems of faith,

00:12:51.580 and jump headlong into rational,

00:12:55.220 utopian constructions of reality.

00:12:57.240 Because people can't do without an interpretive framework.

00:13:02.300 So it wasn't as if the consequence of moving beyond religion

00:13:06.640 was going to be a step into enlightenment,

00:13:09.300 which is what materialist rationalists always presume.

00:13:13.220 They presume if you could just shed the superstitious claptrap

00:13:15.880 that's associated with your religious heritage,

00:13:18.300 you'd instantly be enlightened.

00:13:20.620 But Nietzsche's point was that is not what's likely to happen.

00:13:24.220 What's likely to happen is two things.

00:13:25.580 People will either give up on life completely

00:13:27.640 and become cynical, prematurely cynical,

00:13:30.200 which is certainly a disease of young people.

00:13:33.780 And maybe it's always been a disease of young people,

00:13:35.860 but it's certainly been a disease of young people

00:13:37.860 since, say, the end of World War II.

00:13:40.560 So they become nihilistic

00:13:41.960 and not believe that anything has any meaning,

00:13:43.940 and that undermines their ability to strive,

00:13:46.000 or they'd fall prey to some sort of rigid ideology.

00:13:49.500 And Nietzsche also understood that

00:13:51.540 if people fell prey to a rigid ideology,

00:13:55.340 or several rigid ideologies,

00:13:57.300 that the only plausible outcome of that

00:14:00.160 would be exceptionally intense warfare.

00:14:04.780 And of course, that's exactly what happened

00:14:06.420 in the 20th century.

00:14:09.140 Now, Nietzsche also says,

00:14:11.100 this can't be reversed.

00:14:14.900 Skepticism regarding morality is what is decisive.

00:14:17.360 The end of the moral interpretation of the world,

00:14:21.640 which no longer has any sanction

00:14:23.400 after it has tried to escape into some beyond,

00:14:25.760 leads to nihilism.

00:14:26.860 All lacks meaning.

00:14:29.060 And then he says,

00:14:29.860 the untenability of one interpretation of the world,

00:14:33.520 upon which a tremendous amount of energy

00:14:35.620 has been lavished,

00:14:37.100 awakens the suspicion that all interpretations

00:14:39.240 of the world are false.

00:14:40.340 So, it's a brilliant observation,

00:14:42.720 because his point is,

00:14:45.060 I've seen this in fundamentalist Christians,

00:14:48.920 for example,

00:14:49.600 who I've taught in the past,

00:14:51.540 because I have a very biological view of things.

00:14:54.560 And these people,

00:14:57.080 I met more of them when I was in the United States,

00:14:59.480 they were more intelligent than they were wise.

00:15:05.360 Meaning,

00:15:06.060 the constraints within which their intellect

00:15:09.020 was forced to operate,

00:15:10.120 which would be the Christian fundamentalist constraints,

00:15:12.480 were not sophisticated enough

00:15:13.660 to encapsulate their intellect.

00:15:14.980 They were too smart for their own theories.

00:15:16.820 So, they come to university

00:15:17.860 and be exposed to ideas

00:15:21.640 that were outside the scope,

00:15:22.900 say, of Christian fundamentalism,

00:15:24.100 would just blow their fundamentalist presuppositions

00:15:26.620 into bits.

00:15:27.940 And so then, of course,

00:15:28.720 they fall into nothing.

00:15:30.660 But Nietzsche says,

00:15:31.500 it's even worse than that.

00:15:32.560 It's not only that you fall into nothing,

00:15:34.020 it's that once one of your systems of belief

00:15:37.120 has been destroyed,

00:15:39.220 you also learn that systems of beliefs themselves

00:15:42.040 are unreliable.

00:15:43.660 And so you can't just move easily from one to another,

00:15:46.660 because it's like,

00:15:48.680 well, you're in a boat and it's sunk,

00:15:50.840 and now you know that if you jump to the next boat,

00:15:53.040 that boat could also sink.

00:15:55.320 So it's not only that your boat has sunk,

00:15:58.300 it's now you know that all boats can sink.

00:16:01.080 And so that's part of the position of the modern person,

00:16:04.380 as far as Nietzsche was concerned,

00:16:05.580 is that every one of us knows,

00:16:07.800 at least in principle,

00:16:08.920 that all the boats that we want to jump into

00:16:11.480 could potentially sink.

00:16:13.260 And so Nietzsche saw nihilism as the inevitable consequence,

00:16:17.060 the inevitable rational consequence of that realization.

00:16:21.220 Now, I told you guys before,

00:16:24.400 Nietzsche was a very, very influential person.

00:16:26.380 He influenced Heidegger,

00:16:28.180 and Heidegger influenced Bingswanger and Boss,

00:16:30.580 but Nietzsche also influenced Jung as much as Freud did.

00:16:34.440 And Jung spent his whole career

00:16:36.080 trying to solve the question that Nietzsche posed.

00:16:38.940 One of the questions was,

00:16:40.220 because we must experience nihilism

00:16:43.760 before we can find out what value these values really had.

00:16:46.300 So, the collapse of a belief system

00:16:51.200 makes all the values within it no longer tenable.

00:16:55.720 That's the meaning of Nietzsche's statement that God is dead.

00:16:58.500 He said if you take the central axiom out of a system of belief,

00:17:02.880 you can't hold on to all the things that were derived from that axiom.

00:17:07.020 So, an example is this.

00:17:08.800 So, for example, in modern Western law,

00:17:11.100 there's a presupposition,

00:17:12.160 and the presupposition is that, in some weird sense,

00:17:15.440 everyone is equal before the law.

00:17:17.680 And that's predicated on the idea

00:17:19.220 that that even applies to someone who's a murderer.

00:17:22.060 For you're a murderer,

00:17:23.280 and it's known you have to be treated with respect.

00:17:26.520 You know, you have to be treated with respect by the legal system.

00:17:28.860 And that's a very, very strange...

00:17:31.280 It's a miracle that something like that ever emerged,

00:17:33.960 because it's so unlikely.

00:17:36.400 So, then you might ask,

00:17:37.580 well, what is the idea that everyone has worth

00:17:40.140 before the law grounded in?

00:17:43.060 Where does that idea come from?

00:17:44.220 It comes from the idea of natural rights,

00:17:45.920 that we have natural rights.

00:17:47.360 And then you might ask,

00:17:48.220 well, where do the idea of natural rights come from?

00:17:51.680 Well, then you're starting to move beyond

00:17:54.160 the realm of rational philosophy,

00:17:56.420 because natural rights,

00:17:58.060 the idea of natural rights,

00:17:59.020 has been something...

00:18:00.040 has been an idea that's been emerging

00:18:01.380 for thousands and thousands of years.

00:18:04.360 You know, it's grounded in Christianity,

00:18:06.520 at least in the map.

00:18:11.620 It's grounded in Christianity to the degree

00:18:13.740 that one of the things that distinguishes Christianity

00:18:16.640 is the idea that there is a universal faith,

00:18:20.260 and that everyone,

00:18:21.700 whether they're in that faith or not,

00:18:23.180 has intrinsic value.

00:18:25.820 And so natural rights are grounded in the idea

00:18:27.880 of the intrinsic value of the soul.

00:18:29.620 And then that's grounded in the idea

00:18:31.600 that consciousness itself participates in creation,

00:18:35.300 and say that's an idea that's embedded in Genesis

00:18:37.320 and also in most creation stories.

00:18:39.360 So when you get rid of the religious underpinnings,

00:18:42.400 which ground the entire system

00:18:45.980 in a kind of dreamlike mythology,

00:18:48.160 when you get rid of that,

00:18:49.780 there's no reason that

00:18:50.860 what's left over rationally can survive.

00:18:54.620 And you can see that

00:18:57.000 if you look at what happened in the 20th century,

00:18:59.180 because there were at least two major challenges

00:19:03.200 to the civilizations that evolved,

00:19:07.160 and they weren't only Christian or Jewish civilizations.

00:19:09.980 The same thing happened in China.

00:19:12.980 There was a replacement of these evolved moral systems

00:19:17.420 that emerged over a tremendous amount of time

00:19:19.480 that no one rationally created.

00:19:22.020 Once people started to criticize them

00:19:24.520 and to destroy the axioms on which they were built

00:19:26.940 and moved them aside,

00:19:28.440 then there was a gaping hole left.

00:19:31.180 And the hole was filled, well,

00:19:32.880 it was filled most particularly either by Nazism,

00:19:35.740 which, you know, spread like mad throughout Central Europe,

00:19:38.780 or by communism, which still possesses China.

00:19:42.760 So, you know, even though China came from a historical culture

00:19:47.740 that was substantially different from, say, that of Western Europe,

00:19:51.040 once rationality emerged to the point

00:19:54.100 where it could be used as a critical force,

00:19:56.360 which happened in Europe,

00:19:57.420 that spread like mad,

00:19:58.640 and it undermined the societies of China,

00:20:02.240 just like it undermined the societies of the West.

00:20:05.680 I mean, Russia, you can read this if you read Tolstoy, for example.

00:20:09.840 In Tolstoy's Confessions,

00:20:11.520 Russia was really the last country

00:20:13.200 that underwent the transformations

00:20:16.060 that were associated with the Enlightenment.

00:20:18.080 So when Tolstoy was a young person

00:20:20.380 in the late 19th century,

00:20:24.520 he said he could literally remember

00:20:26.620 when the announcement spread through his school

00:20:29.920 that God was dead.

00:20:32.220 Now, the Western Europeans had been working on that idea

00:20:35.560 for a couple of hundred years,

00:20:37.860 you know, with the dawn of scientific thinking.

00:20:40.900 But the Russians were very backwards in some sense,

00:20:44.780 and they never,

00:20:45.680 they never,

00:20:49.440 they were never affected by the conflict

00:20:51.740 between rationality and religion

00:20:53.480 until it happened all at once.

00:20:56.600 And it happened all at once

00:20:57.940 at the end of the 19th century.

00:20:59.440 And the consequence of that,

00:21:01.400 it's complicated,

00:21:02.220 but the consequence of that

00:21:03.160 was that the monarchy exploded.

00:21:05.080 And then the consequence of that

00:21:06.460 was that the Russians were left with nothing.

00:21:08.080 And the consequence of that was

00:21:09.980 the Bolshevik Revolution.

00:21:13.200 And then that was what started

00:21:14.680 the entire Soviet nightmare.

00:21:18.160 You see very frequently

00:21:19.680 that when a society loses its grounding,

00:21:22.780 say in its historical truths,

00:21:24.440 that it turns to something as an alternative.

00:21:26.540 You see the same thing happened in Quebec.

00:21:28.660 Because Quebec didn't undergo

00:21:30.440 the modern transformation until the late 1950s.

00:21:33.680 It was probably the last European society

00:21:37.040 to go through the Enlightenment revolution

00:21:40.600 because the Catholic Church

00:21:41.600 was an incredibly dominant force

00:21:43.060 in Catholic Quebec until the late 1950s.

00:21:48.020 And the average family size during that time

00:21:50.040 must have been in the neighborhood of 10 children.

00:21:53.280 And then all of a sudden in the late 1950s,

00:21:55.360 the Quebecers just lost their Catholicism.

00:21:57.480 It was just gone.

00:21:58.700 And now, for example,

00:21:59.620 the Quebecois have the lowest marriage rate

00:22:02.480 in the Western world

00:22:04.180 and one of the lowest reproduction rates as well.

00:22:06.320 And there was a Gallup poll that was conducted.

00:22:09.300 I heard about this about,

00:22:11.200 must be 10 years ago now.

00:22:13.000 I don't know if this information

00:22:14.040 has ever been made public.

00:22:15.460 But there was a Gallup poll that indicated that

00:22:17.440 if you were a Catholic who had lost your faith,

00:22:20.300 so you left the church,

00:22:21.820 you were 10 times more likely to be a separatist.

00:22:25.260 So you can see,

00:22:26.600 see the consequence of it is,

00:22:28.600 is that if one belief system disappears,

00:22:31.100 well, nihilism is one possibility.

00:22:32.980 But another possibility is that you just adopt

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00:25:28.080 So Nietzsche

00:25:33.620 diagnosed the disease

00:25:35.640 fundamentally

00:25:36.400 and then the psychoanalysts

00:25:38.100 like Jung in particular

00:25:39.200 they were trying to see

00:25:40.380 Nietzsche believed

00:25:41.220 that if God died

00:25:42.280 because God died

00:25:43.440 people were going

00:25:44.240 to have to take on

00:25:45.140 the responsibility

00:25:46.060 that was once God's

00:25:48.220 so to speak

00:25:49.100 as a personal

00:25:50.020 problem.

00:25:52.300 So

00:25:52.480 in Thus Spake Zarathustra

00:25:54.500 Nietzsche said

00:25:55.280 God is dead

00:25:56.720 and we have killed him

00:25:57.500 and we'll never find

00:25:58.600 enough water

00:25:59.100 to wash away the blood

00:26:00.100 but he also said

00:26:01.300 in order

00:26:02.440 for people

00:26:03.600 to withstand

00:26:04.280 that catastrophe

00:26:05.120 they would have

00:26:05.640 to become

00:26:06.060 gods themselves

00:26:07.060 essentially

00:26:07.660 and

00:26:09.000 well you can see

00:26:10.400 how that might go wrong

00:26:11.380 if you think about

00:26:12.280 people like Stalin

00:26:13.080 and Hitler

00:26:13.620 but

00:26:15.000 but

00:26:16.780 the psychoanalysts

00:26:18.200 also

00:26:18.480 like the psychoanalysts

00:26:20.360 especially Jung

00:26:21.140 and then Heidegger

00:26:22.260 for his part

00:26:23.180 took that idea

00:26:24.320 seriously

00:26:24.860 Jung said

00:26:27.140 was trying to figure out

00:26:28.540 well if we lose

00:26:29.500 our historically

00:26:30.780 conditioned values

00:26:31.940 we no longer

00:26:32.640 believe in them

00:26:33.380 and if nihilism

00:26:34.900 is the outcome

00:26:35.440 on one hand

00:26:36.040 and totalitarianism

00:26:37.040 is the outcome

00:26:37.860 on the other hand

00:26:38.580 what's left

00:26:39.980 and the Jungian idea

00:26:41.780 was

00:26:42.140 well the revelation

00:26:43.500 of the self

00:26:44.420 is that the individual

00:26:45.880 could

00:26:46.260 not as a rational mind

00:26:49.020 but the individual

00:26:50.340 as a totality

00:26:51.240 it's something that

00:26:51.880 Rogers also believed

00:26:52.860 the individuals

00:26:53.720 at totality

00:26:54.380 would be

00:26:54.840 capable of

00:26:55.820 bringing forth

00:26:56.640 genuine values

00:26:57.880 as a consequence

00:26:59.160 of self-exploration

00:27:00.440 and honesty

00:27:01.060 something like that

00:27:02.100 and that's associated

00:27:03.300 with the existential

00:27:04.040 idea of individual

00:27:05.160 responsibility

00:27:05.860 so the

00:27:08.240 one of the upshots

00:27:09.380 of the Jungian

00:27:10.740 theory is that

00:27:11.980 to the degree

00:27:13.460 you don't

00:27:14.200 bear the responsibility

00:27:15.160 for your own actions

00:27:16.400 to the degree

00:27:17.480 that you avoid

00:27:18.160 responsibility

00:27:18.780 or shunt them off

00:27:20.360 onto

00:27:20.700 say totalitarian

00:27:22.700 or ideological

00:27:23.460 system

00:27:24.060 so

00:27:24.320 by

00:27:24.880 when you

00:27:25.740 avoid responsibility

00:27:26.800 for your own thought

00:27:27.760 because

00:27:28.060 if you're the follower

00:27:29.320 of an ideological system

00:27:30.720 you have avoided

00:27:32.040 the responsibility

00:27:32.920 of thinking

00:27:33.520 for yourself

00:27:34.180 and the consequence

00:27:35.520 of that was

00:27:36.420 continual catastrophe

00:27:38.640 as those

00:27:39.320 pathological

00:27:40.280 rational systems

00:27:41.300 unfolded themselves

00:27:43.500 Solzhenitsyn

00:27:45.860 wrote the Gulag

00:27:48.140 archipelago

00:27:48.780 published it

00:27:50.880 in the early

00:27:51.500 1970s

00:27:52.420 and

00:27:52.560 there were two

00:27:55.060 things that made

00:27:55.620 that book

00:27:55.980 very striking

00:27:56.640 one was

00:27:57.820 the stories

00:27:59.200 that he told

00:27:59.720 were so

00:28:00.220 unbelievably powerful

00:28:01.540 that you couldn't

00:28:02.960 read them

00:28:03.580 and

00:28:04.160 not

00:28:05.400 believe it was

00:28:06.520 true

00:28:06.780 and that was

00:28:07.480 even the case

00:28:08.020 if you were

00:28:08.420 a devoted

00:28:09.020 Marxist

00:28:10.200 and at that time

00:28:11.340 in the universities

00:28:12.100 in many ways

00:28:13.020 it hasn't changed

00:28:13.720 that much

00:28:14.300 the universities

00:28:15.080 in the west

00:28:15.720 were dominated

00:28:16.500 by Marxists

00:28:17.400 and

00:28:18.220 to some degree

00:28:19.380 that was

00:28:19.820 ethically inexcusable

00:28:21.380 because people

00:28:22.360 had known

00:28:22.860 since the 1950s

00:28:24.100 especially since

00:28:24.840 George Orwell

00:28:25.760 wrote

00:28:26.100 people had known

00:28:27.260 since the 1950s

00:28:28.480 that the Stalinist

00:28:29.620 state was

00:28:30.080 murderous beyond belief

00:28:31.340 so Stalin

00:28:32.340 for example

00:28:32.940 killed 6 million

00:28:33.980 Ukrainians

00:28:35.200 in the 1930s

00:28:36.680 he starved them

00:28:38.300 to death

00:28:38.660 because all of the

00:28:39.800 farmers had been

00:28:40.440 collectivized

00:28:41.120 at that point

00:28:41.760 and what that meant

00:28:42.920 was all the good

00:28:43.520 farmers had been

00:28:44.220 killed

00:28:44.660 and all the

00:28:45.380 resentful farmers

00:28:46.200 had been given

00:28:46.760 the land

00:28:47.340 and then they

00:28:48.280 collectivized the farms

00:28:49.400 and then Stalin

00:28:50.220 took all the food

00:28:51.060 to feed the cities

00:28:51.940 or to starve

00:28:53.540 the Ukrainians

00:28:54.300 depending on how

00:28:55.280 you look at it

00:28:55.940 and the edicts

00:28:56.880 were so harsh

00:28:57.540 that if you

00:28:58.720 were a Ukrainian

00:28:59.400 and you had a family

00:29:00.740 and they were starving

00:29:01.620 and you went

00:29:02.460 into a field

00:29:03.120 after it had

00:29:04.440 been harvested

00:29:05.160 and you picked

00:29:06.180 out individual

00:29:07.020 grains from the dirt

00:29:08.220 to gather in a bowl

00:29:09.260 to feed your family

00:29:10.060 if you got caught

00:29:11.240 then they would

00:29:11.900 shoot you

00:29:12.440 Solzhenitsyn observed

00:29:15.100 this and he

00:29:15.680 he was very interested

00:29:17.040 in how this system

00:29:17.960 developed

00:29:18.460 and his conclusion

00:29:20.360 after decades

00:29:22.220 of thinking

00:29:22.860 was that the reason

00:29:24.660 the Russian system

00:29:25.520 was able to maintain

00:29:26.280 itself fundamentally

00:29:27.400 was because individuals

00:29:29.100 were willing to give up

00:29:30.640 the responsibility

00:29:31.380 of their own

00:29:32.360 relationship to the truth

00:29:33.940 to the state

00:29:34.920 and constantly lie

00:29:36.340 to themselves

00:29:36.800 about everything

00:29:37.700 and that if the

00:29:39.960 if the individuals

00:29:42.720 that composed the state

00:29:43.780 had refused

00:29:45.060 to accept things

00:29:46.860 that they knew

00:29:47.640 full well

00:29:48.520 to be untrue

00:29:49.340 that the state

00:29:50.220 wouldn't have been

00:29:50.660 able to survive

00:29:51.440 and you know

00:29:52.780 Solzhenitsyn's case

00:29:54.100 is very strong

00:29:54.840 because in some sense

00:29:55.800 he was the first person

00:29:57.180 who told the truth

00:29:57.860 about the Gulag Archipelago

00:29:59.060 which was this chain

00:29:59.920 of prison camps

00:30:00.740 that the Soviets

00:30:01.660 had erected

00:30:02.420 on which their economy

00:30:03.540 was essentially based

00:30:04.740 he was the first person

00:30:06.080 who really told the truth

00:30:07.080 about that

00:30:07.580 and he hit the foundations

00:30:10.260 of Marxist theory

00:30:11.980 so hard

00:30:12.860 that well

00:30:14.900 partly it collapsed

00:30:16.500 and partly it went

00:30:17.420 underground

00:30:17.920 into movements

00:30:18.620 like post-modernism

00:30:19.700 so his

00:30:21.420 his proposition

00:30:22.660 it's a Dostoevskian

00:30:24.800 proposition actually

00:30:25.760 that one person

00:30:26.540 who stopped lying

00:30:27.340 could overturn a tyranny

00:30:29.380 it's a hard thing

00:30:31.120 to believe

00:30:31.680 but there's been

00:30:33.120 multiple examples

00:30:33.960 of that sort of thing

00:30:34.820 in the 20th century

00:30:35.720 it happened with Gandhi

00:30:37.460 happened with

00:30:38.560 Vaclav Havel

00:30:39.300 in Czechoslovakia

00:30:40.220 happened with Nelson Mandela

00:30:41.700 it happened with Solzhenitsyn

00:30:43.560 you know

00:30:44.700 so those are pretty

00:30:45.360 powerful examples

00:30:46.340 of the power

00:30:48.040 of a single individual

00:30:49.160 who refuses

00:30:49.860 to

00:30:50.840 accept

00:30:52.580 the convention

00:30:53.940 the conventional lie

00:30:55.880 Dostoevsky

00:31:00.000 was writing

00:31:00.500 about the same time

00:31:01.320 as Nietzsche

00:31:01.760 and Dostoevsky

00:31:02.380 is a very interesting

00:31:03.180 person

00:31:03.580 he was an orthodox

00:31:04.640 Christian

00:31:05.140 although he's a very

00:31:06.180 intelligent man

00:31:07.260 and

00:31:08.080 Dostoevsky and Nietzsche

00:31:10.460 are twins in some sense

00:31:11.720 so what Nietzsche

00:31:12.600 wrote in philosophy

00:31:13.520 Dostoevsky wrote

00:31:14.440 in literature

00:31:14.960 and

00:31:16.280 one of Dostoevsky's

00:31:18.640 primary

00:31:19.340 statements

00:31:21.640 was that

00:31:22.300 if there's no God

00:31:23.100 everything is permitted

00:31:24.040 so it's a take on

00:31:25.800 Nietzsche's

00:31:27.100 discussion of nihilism

00:31:28.940 it's like

00:31:29.300 well if there's no

00:31:29.880 ultimate value

00:31:30.600 of any sort

00:31:32.000 then why can't you

00:31:33.380 do exactly

00:31:34.100 what you want

00:31:34.840 and that's a

00:31:35.920 theme he explores

00:31:37.080 to great

00:31:38.180 purpose in

00:31:39.280 crime and punishment

00:31:40.060 Dostoevsky's

00:31:43.780 conclusion was

00:31:44.560 that the reason

00:31:45.240 you can't do

00:31:45.780 anything you want

00:31:46.560 is because

00:31:46.940 you actually

00:31:47.420 come equipped

00:31:47.980 with an inherent

00:31:48.800 set of values

00:31:49.960 that are real

00:31:51.080 and that if you

00:31:52.060 violate them

00:31:52.740 to too great a degree

00:31:53.800 you'll destroy

00:31:55.160 your own structure

00:31:56.000 as well as

00:31:56.800 damaging the society

00:31:57.800 that's around you

00:31:58.420 so Dostoevsky was a

00:31:59.460 big believer

00:32:00.340 in some sense

00:32:01.340 like the Jungians

00:32:02.160 and the Rogerians

00:32:03.880 that there are

00:32:05.480 the locus of values

00:32:06.940 within a human being

00:32:07.880 and that it's an

00:32:09.100 actual thing

00:32:10.000 you can't disregard

00:32:11.040 it without damage

00:32:12.100 Dostoevsky was also

00:32:14.120 a very powerful

00:32:14.840 critic of reason

00:32:16.120 and the reason

00:32:17.740 for that was

00:32:18.560 it was reason

00:32:22.040 in some sense

00:32:22.760 that brought down

00:32:23.580 the house of cards

00:32:24.700 so to speak

00:32:26.160 that constituted

00:32:27.260 classical faiths

00:32:28.700 but the consequence

00:32:29.400 of that rational

00:32:30.400 destruction of values

00:32:31.460 was the emergence

00:32:32.440 of nihilism

00:32:33.080 or totalitarianism

00:32:34.120 and the consequence

00:32:34.940 of those two things

00:32:35.920 is either the inability

00:32:37.280 to live

00:32:37.820 or the emergence

00:32:38.800 of the murderous state

00:32:40.840 so Dostoevsky

00:32:41.680 looked at that

00:32:42.780 and thought

00:32:43.160 okay well

00:32:43.820 perhaps our belief

00:32:45.780 that reason itself

00:32:47.060 is the proper guide

00:32:48.500 to reality

00:32:49.920 is wrong

00:32:50.900 and so this is

00:32:52.280 one of the things

00:32:52.920 he wrote

00:32:53.280 in notes from underground

00:32:54.140 when he was

00:32:55.160 exploring this idea

00:32:56.840 notes from underground

00:32:57.840 by the way

00:32:58.260 it's a very short book

00:32:59.180 and it's very much

00:32:59.980 worth reading

00:33:00.540 it's Dostoevsky

00:33:02.360 wrote five books

00:33:03.280 that are incalculably

00:33:05.820 great

00:33:06.400 and what happened

00:33:08.500 to Dostoevsky

00:33:09.340 I don't remember

00:33:10.600 if I told you this

00:33:11.300 or not

00:33:11.560 but he was a student

00:33:12.580 radical

00:33:13.000 and he was

00:33:13.460 he was arrested

00:33:14.220 by the czar's men

00:33:15.200 because of a riot

00:33:17.440 or a protest

00:33:18.920 that him and his

00:33:19.980 compatriots

00:33:20.600 had come up with

00:33:21.120 he was sort of

00:33:21.600 a bit player in it

00:33:22.560 but they put him

00:33:23.340 in prison

00:33:24.160 when he was

00:33:24.900 a young man

00:33:25.460 and then

00:33:26.240 he was in prison

00:33:27.100 for quite a while

00:33:27.840 and then one day

00:33:28.800 they took him out

00:33:29.340 into the courtyard

00:33:30.000 and they shot him

00:33:30.920 at dawn

00:33:32.020 you know

00:33:32.540 they had the soldiers

00:33:33.660 line up

00:33:34.140 and put him by a post

00:33:35.400 and shot him

00:33:36.060 but they used blanks

00:33:37.600 but he didn't know that

00:33:39.160 and it scared him so bad

00:33:40.660 he had epileptic seizure

00:33:42.200 and then he had epileptic seizures

00:33:43.640 for the rest of his life

00:33:44.700 and the kind of epileptic seizures

00:33:46.360 he had

00:33:46.940 were associated

00:33:47.920 with mystical experience

00:33:49.160 so Dostoevsky

00:33:50.280 before he got a seizure

00:33:51.520 would have this sense

00:33:52.860 that he was experiencing

00:33:54.680 the world

00:33:55.280 in a more and more

00:33:55.980 meaningful way

00:33:56.820 until he was on

00:33:57.880 the very dawn

00:33:58.700 of sort of

00:33:59.760 omniscient knowledge

00:34:01.700 and then he'd have a seizure

00:34:02.620 but it wasn't until

00:34:04.780 he was shot with blanks

00:34:06.240 and then put in this

00:34:06.960 terrible prison

00:34:07.680 for a long period of time

00:34:08.860 and had epilepsy

00:34:10.060 that he became

00:34:10.740 a great novelist

00:34:11.640 it changed him

00:34:12.600 in some way

00:34:13.260 his early writings

00:34:14.940 are really

00:34:15.360 they're not good

00:34:16.560 they're sterile

00:34:18.020 and dry

00:34:18.560 and his later writings

00:34:19.960 the five great novels

00:34:21.080 in particular

00:34:21.620 are

00:34:21.960 they're in a

00:34:22.820 they're in a class

00:34:23.540 of their own

00:34:24.160 so Dostoevsky

00:34:26.460 the first thing

00:34:27.460 Dostoevsky

00:34:28.140 tried to come to grips

00:34:29.580 with was the fact

00:34:30.440 he didn't believe

00:34:31.340 that life itself

00:34:32.580 was rational

00:34:33.540 because that's

00:34:34.600 an enlightenment proposition

00:34:35.640 that the structure

00:34:36.360 of reality is

00:34:37.300 in and of itself

00:34:38.420 rational

00:34:38.980 so it can be held

00:34:39.860 it can be dealt with

00:34:41.000 by rational means

00:34:42.060 and that's been

00:34:42.840 a very powerful theory

00:34:43.820 because it's enabled us

00:34:44.760 to develop this

00:34:45.500 scientific viewpoint

00:34:46.900 and the technology

00:34:48.140 that goes along with it

00:34:49.220 but rationality

00:34:51.600 is not the only

00:34:52.760 mode of human knowing

00:34:54.240 there's all sorts

00:34:54.840 of other modes

00:34:55.480 of human knowing

00:34:56.120 and many of them

00:34:57.160 those are associated

00:34:58.040 with emotion

00:34:58.680 and motivation

00:34:59.360 they're more

00:34:59.880 biologically instantiated

00:35:02.040 say and less

00:35:02.560 computational

00:35:03.340 and rationality

00:35:06.020 has a very difficult

00:35:06.880 time

00:35:07.400 even conceptualizing

00:35:09.120 how those other

00:35:09.760 modes of knowing

00:35:10.360 might be real

00:35:11.140 and so what it tends

00:35:11.980 to do is denigrate

00:35:12.880 them as mere

00:35:13.940 opponents to

00:35:15.000 rationality

00:35:15.760 but the Dostoevskian

00:35:17.300 perspective

00:35:17.820 and this is also

00:35:18.580 something that

00:35:19.100 Rogers followed up

00:35:20.420 on and Jung

00:35:21.400 was that

00:35:21.900 life itself

00:35:23.300 is so irrational

00:35:24.220 or experience

00:35:25.320 itself is so

00:35:26.340 irrational

00:35:26.840 given its suffering

00:35:28.400 and its absurdity

00:35:30.000 that a merely

00:35:31.760 rationally formulated

00:35:33.200 representation of life

00:35:34.860 is insufficient

00:35:36.200 it can't

00:35:37.820 it can't manage

00:35:39.660 the job

00:35:40.300 and what rationality

00:35:42.140 will therefore

00:35:43.460 do is cut away

00:35:45.460 everything from life

00:35:46.620 cut away

00:35:47.960 everything from

00:35:48.960 its definition

00:35:49.620 of reality

00:35:50.260 that it can't

00:35:51.000 actually

00:35:51.480 encapsulate

00:35:53.160 Dostoevsky said

00:35:56.480 in short

00:35:58.360 one may say

00:35:59.000 anything about

00:35:59.540 the history

00:35:59.960 of the world

00:36:00.500 anything that

00:36:01.620 might enter

00:36:02.120 the most

00:36:02.460 disordered

00:36:03.140 imagination

00:36:03.780 the only thing

00:36:05.020 one can't say

00:36:05.880 is that it's

00:36:06.800 rational

00:36:07.300 the very word

00:36:09.120 sticks in one's

00:36:09.900 throat

00:36:10.200 and indeed

00:36:12.340 this is the

00:36:12.820 odd thing

00:36:13.320 that is

00:36:13.920 continually

00:36:14.280 happening

00:36:14.760 they are

00:36:15.240 continually

00:36:15.620 turning up

00:36:16.220 in life

00:36:16.580 moral and

00:36:17.240 rational

00:36:17.620 persons

00:36:18.220 sages

00:36:18.920 and lovers

00:36:19.800 of humanity

00:36:20.500 who make it

00:36:21.400 their object

00:36:21.800 to live all

00:36:22.400 their lives

00:36:22.780 as morally

00:36:23.300 and rationally

00:36:24.100 as possible

00:36:24.720 to be

00:36:25.540 so to speak

00:36:26.160 a light

00:36:26.580 to their

00:36:26.880 neighbors

00:36:27.180 simply in

00:36:27.680 order

00:36:27.860 to show

00:36:28.760 them

00:36:28.940 that it

00:36:29.220 is possible

00:36:29.840 to live

00:36:30.280 morally

00:36:30.660 and rationally

00:36:31.520 in this

00:36:31.880 world

00:36:32.220 and yet

00:36:33.720 we all

00:36:34.240 know

00:36:34.500 that these

00:36:35.220 very people

00:36:35.820 sooner or

00:36:36.280 later

00:36:36.440 have been

00:36:36.800 false

00:36:37.200 to themselves

00:36:37.860 that's

00:36:39.020 a precursor

00:36:39.680 of Freudian

00:36:40.240 ideas

00:36:40.760 playing some

00:36:42.800 queer trick

00:36:43.480 often a

00:36:45.040 most unseemly

00:36:45.780 one

00:36:46.060 now I ask

00:36:47.740 you

00:36:47.940 what can

00:36:48.640 be expected

00:36:49.320 of man

00:36:49.980 since he

00:36:51.120 is a being

00:36:51.700 endowed

00:36:52.240 with such

00:36:53.100 strange

00:36:53.480 qualities

00:36:53.980 shower upon

00:36:55.440 him every

00:36:56.220 earthly

00:36:56.700 blessing

00:36:57.280 drown him

00:36:58.780 in a sea

00:36:59.160 of happiness

00:36:59.720 so that

00:37:00.500 nothing but

00:37:01.100 bubbles of

00:37:01.640 bliss

00:37:01.980 can be seen

00:37:02.840 on the

00:37:03.160 surface

00:37:03.560 give him

00:37:05.020 economic

00:37:05.520 prosperity

00:37:06.060 so that he

00:37:06.960 should have

00:37:07.280 nothing else

00:37:07.820 to do

00:37:08.080 but sleep

00:37:08.720 eat cakes

00:37:10.200 and busy

00:37:11.000 himself

00:37:11.400 with the

00:37:11.780 continuation

00:37:12.220 of the

00:37:12.780 species

00:37:13.260 and even

00:37:14.660 then out

00:37:15.120 of sheer

00:37:15.520 ingratitude

00:37:16.220 and spite

00:37:17.580 man would

00:37:18.440 play you

00:37:18.920 some nasty

00:37:19.580 trick

00:37:20.020 he would

00:37:21.860 even risk

00:37:22.280 his cakes

00:37:22.840 and would

00:37:23.860 deliberately

00:37:24.200 desire the

00:37:24.840 most fatal

00:37:25.460 rubbish

00:37:25.920 the most

00:37:26.740 uneconomical

00:37:27.860 absurdity

00:37:28.620 simply to

00:37:29.680 introduce into

00:37:30.320 all this

00:37:30.700 positive good

00:37:31.360 sense

00:37:31.740 his fatal

00:37:32.600 fantastic

00:37:33.240 element

00:37:33.740 it is just

00:37:35.480 his fantastic

00:37:36.200 dreams

00:37:36.780 his vulgar

00:37:37.620 folly

00:37:38.120 that he

00:37:38.840 will desire

00:37:39.300 to retain

00:37:39.880 simply in

00:37:40.600 order to

00:37:40.960 prove to

00:37:41.340 himself

00:37:41.760 as if

00:37:42.720 that was

00:37:43.180 so necessary

00:37:44.040 that men

00:37:45.240 are still

00:37:45.600 men

00:37:45.980 and not

00:37:47.280 the keys

00:37:47.680 of a piano

00:37:48.220 which the

00:37:48.680 laws of

00:37:49.100 nature

00:37:49.420 threaten to

00:37:50.120 control so

00:37:50.720 completely

00:37:51.220 that soon

00:37:52.260 one will be

00:37:52.800 able to

00:37:53.100 desire nothing

00:37:53.960 except by

00:37:55.360 the calendar

00:37:55.920 and that's

00:37:57.280 not all

00:37:57.740 even if

00:37:59.540 man really

00:38:00.020 were nothing

00:38:00.620 but a piano

00:38:01.160 key

00:38:01.460 even if

00:38:02.200 this were

00:38:02.480 proved to

00:38:02.900 him by

00:38:03.160 natural

00:38:03.540 science

00:38:03.940 and

00:38:04.080 mathematics

00:38:04.580 even then

00:38:05.720 he would

00:38:06.040 not become

00:38:06.480 reasonable

00:38:06.960 he would

00:38:08.100 do

00:38:08.340 purposefully

00:38:09.260 do something

00:38:09.880 perverse

00:38:10.500 out of

00:38:11.120 simple

00:38:11.400 ingratitude

00:38:12.100 simply

00:38:12.880 to gain

00:38:13.560 his point

00:38:14.040 and if

00:38:14.660 he does

00:38:14.920 not find

00:38:15.300 means

00:38:15.600 he will

00:38:15.880 contrive

00:38:16.300 destruction

00:38:16.920 and chaos

00:38:17.740 and suffering

00:38:19.260 of all sorts

00:38:19.960 only to gain

00:38:20.720 his point

00:38:21.340 he will launch

00:38:22.700 a curse

00:38:23.100 upon the

00:38:23.600 world

00:38:23.880 and as

00:38:24.940 only man

00:38:25.540 can curse

00:38:26.180 it's his

00:38:27.240 privilege

00:38:27.700 the primary

00:38:28.620 distinction

00:38:29.220 between him

00:38:29.840 and other

00:38:30.160 animals

00:38:30.660 maybe by

00:38:31.860 his curse

00:38:32.260 alone he

00:38:32.760 will attain

00:38:33.220 his object

00:38:33.880 that is

00:38:34.580 to convince

00:38:35.060 himself

00:38:35.460 that he's

00:38:36.180 a man

00:38:36.680 and not

00:38:37.220 a piano

00:38:37.620 key

00:38:37.920 and if

00:38:38.940 you say

00:38:39.280 that all

00:38:39.640 of this

00:38:39.980 too can

00:38:40.360 be calculated

00:38:40.960 and tabulated

00:38:41.680 and chaos

00:38:42.600 and darkness

00:38:43.140 and curses

00:38:43.780 so that the

00:38:44.520 mere possibility

00:38:45.360 of calculating

00:38:46.260 it all

00:38:46.600 beforehand

00:38:47.080 would stop

00:38:48.100 it all

00:38:48.520 and reason

00:38:50.620 would reassert

00:38:51.240 itself

00:38:51.680 then man

00:38:52.820 would purposefully

00:38:53.440 go mad

00:38:53.900 in order to be

00:38:54.500 rid of reason

00:38:55.060 and gain his

00:38:55.600 point

00:38:55.900 I believe

00:38:57.080 in it

00:38:57.400 I answer

00:38:58.040 for it

00:38:58.440 for the

00:38:58.860 whole work

00:38:59.300 of man

00:38:59.660 really seems

00:39:00.200 to consist

00:39:00.760 in nothing

00:39:01.200 but proving

00:39:01.700 to himself

00:39:02.200 every minute

00:39:02.780 that he's

00:39:03.460 a man

00:39:03.980 and not

00:39:04.860 a piano

00:39:05.240 key

00:39:05.560 it might

00:39:06.440 be at

00:39:06.660 the cost

00:39:07.000 of his

00:39:07.260 skin

00:39:07.660 it might

00:39:08.540 be by

00:39:08.860 cannibalism

00:39:09.580 and this

00:39:10.760 being so

00:39:11.360 can one

00:39:12.040 help being

00:39:12.640 tempted to

00:39:13.120 rejoice

00:39:13.460 that it

00:39:13.780 has not

00:39:14.120 yet come

00:39:14.580 off

00:39:14.880 and that

00:39:15.420 desire

00:39:15.720 still depends

00:39:16.340 on something

00:39:16.740 we don't

00:39:17.200 know

00:39:17.520 you will

00:39:19.540 scream at

00:39:20.100 me

00:39:20.360 that is

00:39:21.500 if you

00:39:21.760 condescend

00:39:22.240 to do

00:39:22.620 so

00:39:22.860 that no

00:39:23.360 one is

00:39:23.620 touching

00:39:24.000 my free

00:39:24.500 will

00:39:24.760 that all

00:39:25.580 they're

00:39:25.780 concerned

00:39:26.120 with is

00:39:26.500 that my

00:39:26.900 free

00:39:27.280 will

00:39:27.680 should

00:39:28.320 of itself

00:39:29.040 of its

00:39:29.440 own

00:39:29.620 free

00:39:29.860 will

00:39:30.180 coincide

00:39:31.260 with my

00:39:31.580 own

00:39:31.760 normal

00:39:32.040 interests

00:39:32.460 and the

00:39:32.860 laws of

00:39:33.220 nature

00:39:33.500 and arithmetic

00:39:34.080 good heavens

00:39:35.480 gentlemen

00:39:35.860 what sort

00:39:36.260 of free

00:39:36.520 will is

00:39:36.840 left

00:39:37.120 when we

00:39:37.380 come to

00:39:38.300 tabulation

00:39:38.840 and arithmetic

00:39:39.400 when it

00:39:40.220 will all

00:39:40.520 be a

00:39:40.800 case of

00:39:41.180 twice

00:39:41.560 two

00:39:41.900 makes

00:39:42.220 four

00:39:42.600 twice

00:39:43.640 two

00:39:43.860 makes

00:39:44.080 four

00:39:44.280 without

00:39:44.520 my

00:39:44.840 will

00:39:45.140 as if

00:39:45.940 free

00:39:46.160 will

00:39:46.380 meant

00:39:46.680 that

00:39:47.180 that was

00:39:49.600 written

00:39:49.940 in the

00:39:51.200 late 1800s

00:39:52.700 as well

00:39:53.440 and Dostoyevsky

00:39:54.340 had already

00:39:54.880 figured out

00:39:56.100 by that

00:39:56.620 point

00:39:57.080 that the

00:39:58.260 consequence

00:39:58.700 of the

00:39:59.220 new ideas

00:39:59.880 swimming

00:40:00.740 into

00:40:01.060 Russia

00:40:01.460 and

00:40:02.420 undermining

00:40:03.120 orthodox

00:40:03.860 christianity

00:40:04.560 which was

00:40:05.000 say the

00:40:05.780 natural

00:40:06.180 culture

00:40:06.620 in some

00:40:06.980 sense

00:40:07.200 of

00:40:07.340 Russia

00:40:07.680 was going

00:40:08.440 to be

00:40:08.900 either

00:40:09.400 nihilism

00:40:09.880 or

00:40:10.080 totalitarianism

00:40:11.040 and he

00:40:12.240 examined

00:40:13.000 the

00:40:13.300 propositions

00:40:14.320 of

00:40:14.720 totalitarianism

00:40:15.820 and the

00:40:16.320 propositions

00:40:16.900 of

00:40:17.080 totalitarianism

00:40:17.940 were

00:40:18.100 essentially

00:40:18.560 utopian

00:40:19.220 the idea

00:40:20.340 was

00:40:20.680 accept

00:40:21.600 it's like

00:40:22.140 a cult

00:40:22.640 accept

00:40:23.220 this

00:40:23.740 mode of

00:40:24.220 being

00:40:24.480 accept

00:40:24.800 this

00:40:25.100 interpretation

00:40:25.560 of the

00:40:26.040 world

00:40:26.320 and society

00:40:27.460 will

00:40:27.800 advance

00:40:28.920 towards a

00:40:29.480 point

00:40:29.700 where

00:40:30.000 well

00:40:30.240 say in

00:40:30.620 the

00:40:30.740 case

00:40:30.960 of

00:40:31.120 communism

00:40:31.580 wealth

00:40:32.700 is

00:40:32.880 equally

00:40:33.160 distributed

00:40:33.760 and everyone

00:40:34.340 is free

00:40:34.960 that's a

00:40:36.160 very very

00:40:36.640 powerful

00:40:37.180 idea

00:40:37.900 obviously

00:40:38.440 because it

00:40:39.040 attracted

00:40:39.640 hundreds of

00:40:40.300 millions

00:40:40.560 of people

00:40:41.220 each

00:40:41.920 according

00:40:42.320 to each

00:40:45.080 according

00:40:45.420 to his

00:40:46.220 need

00:40:46.480 from each

00:40:47.060 according

00:40:47.640 to his

00:40:47.980 ability

00:40:48.400 sounds

00:40:48.960 fair

00:40:49.380 you get

00:40:49.940 what you

00:40:50.240 need

00:40:51.240 to live

00:40:51.740 and you

00:40:52.080 contribute

00:40:52.700 what's

00:40:53.320 in it

00:40:53.640 what's in

00:40:55.060 you to

00:40:55.340 contribute

00:40:55.780 and when

00:40:56.580 it was

00:40:56.820 laid out

00:40:57.240 in the

00:40:57.440 world

00:40:57.600 it was

00:40:57.820 an

00:40:58.020 absolute

00:40:58.420 catastrophe

00:40:59.120 and

00:40:59.900 Dostoevsky

00:41:00.500 criticized

00:41:00.900 this

00:41:01.260 before it

00:41:01.660 even

00:41:01.820 happened

00:41:02.200 he said

00:41:02.940 look

00:41:03.380 human

00:41:04.480 beings

00:41:04.840 do not

00:41:05.400 want

00:41:05.840 utopia

00:41:06.560 we're

00:41:07.580 too

00:41:07.900 insane

00:41:08.600 for that

00:41:09.360 if you

00:41:10.500 if you

00:41:10.920 had

00:41:11.220 comfort

00:41:12.160 sterile

00:41:13.460 comfort

00:41:13.800 if you

00:41:14.040 had

00:41:14.160 everything

00:41:14.600 you

00:41:14.800 wanted

00:41:15.020 just

00:41:15.280 given

00:41:15.560 to you

00:41:15.960 all you

00:41:16.960 do

00:41:17.140 is

00:41:17.260 go

00:41:17.420 crazy

00:41:17.800 just

00:41:18.180 so

00:41:18.360 that

00:41:18.560 you

00:41:18.680 wouldn't

00:41:18.920 have

00:41:19.120 to be

00:41:19.400 bored

00:41:19.700 by all

00:41:20.080 that

00:41:20.240 perfection

00:41:20.720 you

00:41:21.180 destroy

00:41:21.900 it

00:41:22.360 so

00:41:22.860 that

00:41:23.040 the

00:41:23.200 irrational

00:41:23.680 element

00:41:24.100 that's

00:41:24.380 inside

00:41:24.740 of

00:41:24.880 you

00:41:25.000 so

00:41:25.140 this

00:41:25.340 Dionysian

00:41:26.020 element

00:41:26.400 could

00:41:27.200 leap

00:41:27.860 out

00:41:28.100 and

00:41:28.300 live

00:41:28.720 and

00:41:29.240 so

00:41:29.400 whatever

00:41:29.720 utopia

00:41:30.260 is

00:41:30.800 it's

00:41:31.400 not

00:41:31.660 the

00:41:31.960 permanent

00:41:32.380 solution

00:41:32.960 to

00:41:33.200 all

00:41:33.420 of

00:41:33.560 your

00:41:33.700 problems

00:41:34.240 you

00:41:35.040 don't

00:41:35.180 even

00:41:35.340 want

00:41:35.520 to

00:41:35.660 live

00:41:35.920 without

00:41:36.260 problems

00:41:36.960 Kierkegaard

00:41:40.640 writing

00:41:41.300 a little

00:41:42.060 earlier

00:41:42.580 but

00:41:44.380 along

00:41:44.880 a similar

00:41:46.020 track

00:41:46.420 of ideas

00:41:46.920 he's

00:41:49.840 also

00:41:50.280 criticizing

00:41:50.900 the idea

00:41:51.400 of

00:41:51.560 utopia

00:41:52.100 believing

00:41:53.380 at least

00:41:53.820 in part

00:41:54.260 that

00:41:54.460 the meaning

00:41:55.080 in life

00:41:55.880 is to

00:41:56.180 be found

00:41:56.900 within

00:41:57.620 the struggle

00:41:58.460 that

00:41:59.240 constitutes

00:41:59.880 life

00:42:00.380 and not

00:42:01.280 in

00:42:01.820 the solution

00:42:02.860 to that

00:42:03.300 struggle

00:42:03.720 which

00:42:04.220 maybe

00:42:04.540 is

00:42:04.760 equivalent

00:42:05.120 to

00:42:05.440 death

00:42:05.860 and not

00:42:06.540 to

00:42:06.780 utopia

00:42:07.340 it is

00:42:08.840 about

00:42:09.120 four years

00:42:10.100 ago

00:42:10.260 that I

00:42:10.520 got the

00:42:10.820 notion

00:42:11.060 of wanting

00:42:11.400 to try

00:42:11.760 my luck

00:42:12.100 as an

00:42:12.380 author

00:42:12.640 I

00:42:13.620 remember

00:42:13.960 it

00:42:14.160 quite

00:42:14.360 clearly

00:42:14.740 it was

00:42:15.260 a Sunday

00:42:15.720 yes

00:42:16.600 a Sunday

00:42:17.480 afternoon

00:42:17.980 I was

00:42:18.540 seated

00:42:18.740 as usual

00:42:19.360 outside

00:42:19.960 at the

00:42:20.340 cafe

00:42:20.640 in the

00:42:21.280 Fredericksburg

00:42:21.820 garden

00:42:22.180 I'd been

00:42:22.960 a student

00:42:23.460 for half

00:42:23.940 a score

00:42:24.260 of years

00:42:24.800 although

00:42:25.760 never lazy

00:42:26.880 all my

00:42:27.580 activity

00:42:28.040 nevertheless

00:42:28.460 was like

00:42:29.040 a glittering

00:42:29.760 inactivity

00:42:30.460 a kind

00:42:31.180 of occupation

00:42:31.800 for which

00:42:32.340 I still

00:42:33.120 have a great

00:42:33.580 partiality

00:42:34.340 and for which

00:42:35.220 perhaps I even

00:42:35.900 have a little

00:42:36.320 genius

00:42:36.780 I read

00:42:37.940 much

00:42:38.320 spent the

00:42:39.400 remainder

00:42:39.700 of the day

00:42:40.160 idling

00:42:40.640 and thinking

00:42:41.220 or thinking

00:42:42.060 and idling

00:42:42.580 but that

00:42:43.140 was all

00:42:43.380 it came

00:42:43.740 to

00:42:43.980 so I

00:42:45.420 sat there

00:42:45.980 and I

00:42:46.480 smoked my

00:42:46.920 cigar

00:42:47.160 until I

00:42:47.620 lapsed

00:42:47.960 into thought

00:42:48.520 among other

00:42:49.340 thoughts

00:42:49.840 I remember

00:42:50.700 these

00:42:51.280 you were

00:42:52.540 going on

00:42:53.180 I said

00:42:53.880 to myself

00:42:54.440 to become

00:42:55.220 an old

00:42:55.540 man

00:42:55.880 without

00:42:56.320 being

00:42:56.760 anything

00:42:57.180 and without

00:42:58.180 really

00:42:58.460 undertaking

00:42:58.980 to do

00:42:59.420 anything

00:42:59.880 on other

00:43:01.380 hand

00:43:01.640 wherever you

00:43:02.080 look around

00:43:02.580 you

00:43:02.840 in literature

00:43:03.560 and in

00:43:04.000 life

00:43:04.220 you see

00:43:04.660 the celebrated

00:43:05.280 names

00:43:05.680 and figures

00:43:06.260 the precious

00:43:07.380 and much

00:43:07.920 heralded men

00:43:08.560 who are coming

00:43:09.020 into prominence

00:43:09.780 and are much

00:43:10.480 talked about

00:43:11.160 the many

00:43:12.260 benefactors

00:43:12.880 of the age

00:43:13.360 who know

00:43:13.620 how to

00:43:13.900 benefit

00:43:14.200 mankind

00:43:14.560 by making

00:43:15.140 life easier

00:43:15.820 and easier

00:43:16.340 some

00:43:17.300 by railways

00:43:18.060 others

00:43:18.700 by omnibuses

00:43:19.480 and steamboats

00:43:20.280 others

00:43:20.560 by the

00:43:20.920 telegraph

00:43:21.500 others

00:43:22.100 by easily

00:43:22.800 apprehended

00:43:23.480 compendiums

00:43:24.140 and short

00:43:24.760 recitals

00:43:25.240 of everything

00:43:25.980 worth knowing

00:43:26.620 and finally

00:43:28.400 the true

00:43:28.740 benefactors

00:43:29.320 of the age

00:43:29.760 who make

00:43:30.060 spiritual

00:43:30.540 existence

00:43:31.020 in virtue

00:43:31.540 of thought

00:43:32.100 easier

00:43:32.880 and easier

00:43:33.400 yet more

00:43:34.280 and more

00:43:34.560 significant

00:43:35.120 and what

00:43:36.280 are you

00:43:36.480 doing

00:43:36.760 here

00:43:38.280 my

00:43:38.520 soliloquy

00:43:39.120 was interrupted

00:43:39.760 because my

00:43:40.420 cigarette was

00:43:40.960 smoked out

00:43:41.460 and a new

00:43:42.160 one had

00:43:42.480 to be lit

00:43:42.940 so I smoked

00:43:43.780 again

00:43:44.120 and then

00:43:44.460 suddenly

00:43:44.760 this thought

00:43:45.540 flashed

00:43:46.020 into my

00:43:46.380 mind

00:43:46.740 you must

00:43:48.500 do something

00:43:49.180 but in as

00:43:50.100 much as

00:43:50.440 with your

00:43:50.740 limited

00:43:51.020 capacities

00:43:51.560 it will

00:43:51.960 be impossible

00:43:52.580 for you

00:43:53.460 to make

00:43:53.740 anything

00:43:54.140 easier

00:43:54.600 than it

00:43:54.940 has already

00:43:55.440 become

00:43:55.880 you must

00:43:56.700 with the

00:43:57.080 same

00:43:57.380 humanitarian

00:43:58.060 enthusiasm

00:43:59.020 as the

00:43:59.620 others

00:43:59.880 undertake

00:44:00.760 to make

00:44:01.420 something

00:44:01.800 harder

00:44:02.320 this notion

00:44:05.460 pleased me

00:44:05.960 immensely

00:44:06.360 and at the

00:44:07.280 same time

00:44:07.620 it flattered

00:44:08.180 me to think

00:44:08.860 that I

00:44:09.280 like the rest

00:44:09.800 of them

00:44:10.000 would be

00:44:10.520 loved and

00:44:10.940 esteemed

00:44:11.420 by the whole

00:44:11.940 community

00:44:12.400 for when

00:44:13.580 all combine

00:44:14.340 in every

00:44:14.760 way to

00:44:15.140 make

00:44:15.340 everything

00:44:15.740 easier

00:44:16.260 there remains

00:44:17.620 only one

00:44:18.100 possible

00:44:18.520 danger

00:44:19.060 namely

00:44:19.860 that the

00:44:20.780 ease will

00:44:21.220 become so

00:44:21.740 great

00:44:22.060 that it

00:44:22.340 becomes

00:44:22.640 altogether

00:44:23.020 too

00:44:23.320 great

00:44:23.700 then there's

00:44:25.940 only one

00:44:26.320 want left

00:44:26.900 although it

00:44:27.240 is not

00:44:27.540 yet a

00:44:28.160 felt

00:44:28.460 want

00:44:28.900 when people

00:44:29.920 will want

00:44:30.400 difficulty

00:44:31.000 out of

00:44:32.760 love for

00:44:33.120 mankind

00:44:33.400 and out

00:44:33.860 of despair

00:44:34.320 at my

00:44:34.940 embarrassing

00:44:35.340 situation

00:44:35.980 seeing that

00:44:36.700 I had

00:44:36.920 accomplished

00:44:37.300 nothing

00:44:37.840 and was

00:44:38.680 unable to

00:44:39.240 make anything

00:44:39.780 easier than

00:44:40.380 it had already

00:44:41.000 been made

00:44:41.640 and moved

00:44:42.500 by a genuine

00:44:43.060 interest in

00:44:43.600 those who

00:44:43.940 make everything

00:44:44.460 easy

00:44:44.780 I conceived

00:44:46.060 it as my

00:44:46.740 task to

00:44:47.300 create

00:44:47.600 difficulties

00:44:48.300 everywhere

00:44:48.940 Kierkegaard is

00:44:51.460 often regarded

00:44:52.120 as an

00:44:52.500 existentialist

00:44:53.320 one of the

00:44:54.480 ideas that

00:44:55.080 runs its way

00:44:56.180 through

00:44:56.420 existentialism

00:44:57.580 is the idea

00:44:58.120 that to be

00:44:59.220 human is to

00:45:00.220 simultaneously be

00:45:01.460 saddled with

00:45:02.100 an intrinsic

00:45:02.720 responsibility

00:45:04.160 a moral

00:45:04.640 responsibility

00:45:05.260 that you're

00:45:06.960 responsible not

00:45:07.840 only to

00:45:08.280 yourself

00:45:08.760 to your

00:45:09.140 soul

00:45:09.500 say

00:45:09.820 but also

00:45:10.380 to the

00:45:10.700 people

00:45:10.920 around

00:45:11.280 you

00:45:11.580 and that

00:45:12.080 that isn't

00:45:12.660 an arbitrary

00:45:14.920 imposition

00:45:15.640 that's imposed

00:45:16.380 upon you

00:45:16.900 by rationality

00:45:18.000 or by your

00:45:18.580 fellow man

00:45:19.180 for that

00:45:19.560 matter

00:45:19.880 but something

00:45:20.640 that's right

00:45:21.520 at the heart

00:45:22.160 of the reality

00:45:23.140 of existence

00:45:23.940 itself

00:45:24.560 such that if

00:45:25.520 you thwart

00:45:27.140 or fall short

00:45:29.480 of bearing that

00:45:30.120 responsibility

00:45:30.720 you'll pay a

00:45:31.420 price in guilt

00:45:32.100 and in shame

00:45:32.760 and in suffering

00:45:33.900 bin swanger

00:45:38.740 and brought

00:45:39.100 boss

00:45:39.500 working off

00:45:40.480 heidegger's

00:45:40.960 lead said

00:45:41.600 that guilt

00:45:43.500 and fear

00:45:43.960 are debts

00:45:44.580 to possibility

00:45:45.500 if you're

00:45:46.660 guilty about

00:45:47.200 something

00:45:47.640 well it's

00:45:48.820 because you're

00:45:49.200 not upholding

00:45:49.740 your responsibility

00:45:50.500 whereas for

00:45:51.320 freud that was

00:45:51.940 often a form

00:45:53.100 of pathology

00:45:53.920 excess guilt

00:45:55.540 and of course

00:45:56.140 excess guilt

00:45:57.120 can become

00:45:57.560 pathological

00:45:58.200 but kierkegaard's

00:45:59.680 point is that

00:46:00.180 guilt itself

00:46:01.000 isn't something

00:46:01.760 to be cured

00:46:02.460 it's an

00:46:04.540 integral

00:46:05.220 and necessary

00:46:06.120 part of reality

00:46:07.040 just like

00:46:07.780 disgust

00:46:08.320 and despair

00:46:08.880 and fear

00:46:09.420 and all the

00:46:09.880 negative emotions

00:46:10.720 they alert you

00:46:11.760 to your place

00:46:12.560 in the world

00:46:13.160 and guide you

00:46:14.380 towards the

00:46:15.720 unfolding

00:46:16.300 of your spirit

00:46:17.340 failure to

00:46:20.360 shoulder your

00:46:20.860 existential burden

00:46:21.820 is what results

00:46:22.740 in neurotic

00:46:23.360 guilt and fear

00:46:24.460 bin swanger

00:46:27.800 and boss

00:46:28.180 also believe

00:46:28.820 that like

00:46:29.600 existential anxiety

00:46:31.120 and that's

00:46:32.180 the feeling

00:46:32.620 of nothingness

00:46:33.840 is fear

00:46:35.440 of loss

00:46:36.000 of world

00:46:36.720 that the

00:46:38.520 world that

00:46:38.980 you inhabit

00:46:39.480 the conceptual

00:46:40.100 world that you

00:46:40.720 inhabit can be

00:46:42.000 destroyed at any

00:46:43.000 moment and that

00:46:43.640 you're aware of

00:46:44.240 that at some

00:46:44.700 level it's the

00:46:45.260 same comment

00:46:45.780 that Nietzsche

00:46:46.240 made and

00:46:47.160 Nietzsche believed

00:46:48.200 that this was

00:46:49.020 something that

00:46:49.400 modern people

00:46:49.980 were particularly

00:46:50.620 susceptible to

00:46:51.520 because our

00:46:51.980 rationality is

00:46:52.800 always capable

00:46:53.440 of sawing off

00:46:54.180 the branch

00:46:54.640 that we're

00:46:54.920 sitting on

00:46:55.500 because no

00:46:56.040 matter what

00:46:56.380 you're doing

00:46:56.840 even if you're

00:46:57.420 engaged in it

00:46:58.140 deeply the

00:46:59.160 critical part of

00:46:59.800 your mind can

00:47:00.300 always say

00:47:00.740 well what makes

00:47:01.360 you think that's

00:47:01.940 so worthwhile

00:47:02.580 and you know

00:47:04.000 an answer could

00:47:04.720 be well it

00:47:05.460 manifests itself

00:47:06.720 as being

00:47:07.600 worthwhile and

00:47:08.760 why should I

00:47:09.480 pay attention to

00:47:10.320 those rational

00:47:11.020 doubts but

00:47:12.000 that's not how

00:47:12.740 we're trained

00:47:13.400 we're trained that

00:47:14.560 rationality is the

00:47:16.220 thing that

00:47:16.720 encompasses everything

00:47:17.880 instead of being

00:47:18.760 trained that

00:47:19.260 rationality is

00:47:20.060 something that's

00:47:20.860 encompassed by

00:47:21.660 something else

00:47:22.540 and so if doubts

00:47:24.360 come up that are

00:47:25.100 rational we

00:47:26.420 immediately believe

00:47:27.340 them because

00:47:27.800 they're rational

00:47:28.460 instead of asking

00:47:29.520 ourselves well if

00:47:30.760 the rational doubt

00:47:31.660 is undermining

00:47:32.480 the meaning in

00:47:33.720 my life and

00:47:34.300 making it difficult

00:47:35.060 for me to

00:47:35.560 proceed maybe the

00:47:36.800 thing to do is

00:47:37.560 to question whether

00:47:38.360 or not that doubt

00:47:39.100 is valid now it

00:47:41.160 depends on what you

00:47:41.880 regard as real

00:47:43.160 because if it's

00:47:44.220 real if it's the

00:47:45.400 rational argument

00:47:46.400 itself that's real

00:47:47.420 then you can't

00:47:48.120 dispense with the

00:47:48.820 doubts but if you

00:47:50.020 say well rationality

00:47:51.160 is too limited in

00:47:52.160 its apprehension to

00:47:53.460 deal with the

00:47:54.000 absurdity of life

00:47:55.040 there are other

00:47:56.260 sorts of answers

00:47:57.240 like music for

00:47:58.160 example or or

00:47:59.360 art or or the

00:48:01.220 kind of engagement

00:48:02.000 that you that you

00:48:03.600 experience when

00:48:04.380 you're involved in

00:48:05.360 something that you're

00:48:06.120 incredibly interested

00:48:07.200 in those are forms

00:48:08.420 of reality that

00:48:09.380 that you can regard

00:48:11.920 those as forms of

00:48:12.760 reality that transcend

00:48:13.900 rationalism instead

00:48:15.860 of being something

00:48:16.580 embedded inside

00:48:17.480 rationalism that can

00:48:18.380 be destroyed by

00:48:19.160 doubt and the

00:48:20.460 problem with doubt

00:48:21.320 is that it can

00:48:21.840 undermine you

00:48:22.360 completely not

00:48:23.560 snialism but even

00:48:24.380 worse than that it

00:48:25.400 can lay you open

00:48:26.300 to ideological

00:48:27.040 possession and

00:48:29.000 that's that's

00:48:30.980 satanic in its in

00:48:32.760 its in its

00:48:33.580 catastrophe

00:48:34.400 where I'll talk to

00:48:41.100 you a little bit

00:48:41.500 now about the

00:48:42.040 concentration camp

00:48:43.020 concentration camps

00:48:44.620 were established

00:48:45.380 there they were

00:48:46.960 established in

00:48:47.640 England Germany

00:48:48.300 Russia China

00:48:49.040 Cambodia and

00:48:50.180 Yugoslavia and

00:48:51.540 in the Soviet

00:48:52.320 Union the estimates

00:48:53.840 these are estimates

00:48:54.520 that were derived

00:48:55.080 by Solzhenitsyn

00:48:55.840 were that 66

00:48:56.700 million people

00:48:57.580 died in internal

00:48:59.080 repression in the

00:48:59.940 Soviet Union between

00:49:00.880 1919 and 1959

00:49:02.820 that's a figure that's

00:49:04.180 ten times as great as

00:49:05.460 the figures that are

00:49:06.120 commonly used to

00:49:07.500 describe the genocide

00:49:08.840 rate in the Holocaust

00:49:09.660 which was more like

00:49:10.460 six million and

00:49:11.640 Solzhenitsyn also

00:49:12.560 estimated but no one

00:49:13.660 knows that a hundred

00:49:14.400 million people died in

00:49:15.980 China during Mao's

00:49:17.360 cultural revolution when

00:49:18.880 Mao decided that he was

00:49:19.840 going to wipe out all of

00:49:21.180 Chinese tradition and

00:49:22.400 destroyed much of the

00:49:23.420 much of the ancient

00:49:24.840 artifacts that

00:49:25.500 characterized that

00:49:26.200 tradition in a in a

00:49:27.840 like a riotous

00:49:29.080 catastrophe that lasted

00:49:30.620 more than a decade

00:49:31.620 Solzhenitsyn says the

00:49:38.600 imagination and

00:49:39.500 strength spiritual strength

00:49:41.020 of Shakespeare's

00:49:41.940 evildoers stopped short

00:49:43.580 at a dozen corpses

00:49:44.580 because they had no

00:49:45.880 ideology ideology that's

00:49:48.180 that's what gives evil

00:49:49.760 doing its long sought

00:49:50.680 justification and gives

00:49:52.160 the evildoer the

00:49:52.920 necessary steadfastness

00:49:54.380 and determination

00:49:55.280 that's the social theory

00:49:57.140 which helps to make his

00:49:58.080 acts seem good instead of

00:49:59.360 bad in his own eyes and

00:50:01.180 others this was how the

00:50:02.920 agents of the

00:50:03.520 inquisition fortified their

00:50:04.800 wills by invoking

00:50:05.840 Christianity the conqueror

00:50:07.840 of foreign lands by

00:50:08.660 extolling the grandeur of

00:50:10.120 their motherland the

00:50:11.340 colonizers by civilization

00:50:12.900 the Nazis by race and the

00:50:15.060 Jacobins early and late by

00:50:16.460 equality brotherhood and

00:50:18.060 the happiness of future

00:50:19.060 generations without

00:50:20.300 evildoers there would have

00:50:21.540 been no archipelago the

00:50:23.800 archipelago the gulag

00:50:24.960 archipelago is

00:50:25.760 Solzhenitsyn's metaphor

00:50:27.540 for the for the prison

00:50:30.600 camps like the prison

00:50:32.320 camps that exist now in

00:50:33.480 North Korea in which

00:50:34.780 millions of people are

00:50:35.900 starving and dying for

00:50:38.160 the for the prison camps

00:50:39.180 that littered the entire

00:50:40.200 Soviet Union and those

00:50:42.760 cultures became so

00:50:43.740 pathological that in East

00:50:45.000 Germany for example before

00:50:46.220 the wall fell down and

00:50:47.480 East Germany was

00:50:48.180 arguably one of the

00:50:49.080 more civilized parts of

00:50:50.180 the Soviet state one

00:50:52.360 person out of three was a

00:50:53.740 government informer so if

00:50:55.600 you have a family of five

00:50:56.600 people there's a reasonable

00:50:58.160 probability that two of

00:50:59.620 them are going to tell a

00:51:00.960 government agent what you

00:51:02.100 say and think and that

00:51:04.040 that was also portrayed as

00:51:05.900 the highest possible moral

00:51:07.220 virtue because it was much

00:51:08.880 better for you to be a

00:51:10.620 admirable citizen of the

00:51:12.300 state than say a loyal

00:51:13.440 daughter and that's what

00:51:14.800 children were taught in

00:51:15.640 school that the family was a

00:51:17.320 defunct unit and that

00:51:18.720 individual relationships were

00:51:20.040 secondary and that all that

00:51:21.460 mattered was adherence to the

00:51:23.140 dogma that constituted the

00:51:24.400 central axioms of the state

00:51:25.760 this is Solzhenitsyn's

00:51:30.080 description of how communist

00:51:33.040 ideological uniformity was

00:51:35.000 enforced in the prison camps

00:51:36.680 an anonymous author is told

00:51:40.780 how executions were carried

00:51:41.940 out at Adak a camp on the

00:51:43.720 Petra River they would take

00:51:45.160 the opposition members with

00:51:47.120 their things out of the camp

00:51:48.420 compound on a prisoner

00:51:49.420 transport at night and

00:51:50.940 outside the compound stood the

00:51:52.260 small house of the third

00:51:53.640 section the condemned men

00:51:57.060 were taken into a room one at

00:51:58.400 a time and there the camp

00:51:59.940 guards sprang on them their

00:52:01.740 mouths were stuffed with

00:52:02.720 something soft and their arms

00:52:03.880 were bound with cords behind

00:52:05.400 their backs then they were

00:52:07.520 led out into the courtyard

00:52:08.540 where harnessed carts were

00:52:09.620 waiting the bound prisoners

00:52:11.500 were piled on the carts from

00:52:13.160 five to seven at a time and

00:52:14.980 driven off to the Gorka the

00:52:16.640 camp cemetery on arrival they

00:52:18.880 were tipped into big pits that

00:52:20.180 had already been prepared and

00:52:21.360 buried alive not out of

00:52:23.440 brutality no it had been

00:52:26.300 ascertained that when dragging

00:52:29.040 and lifting them it was much

00:52:30.020 easier to cope with living

00:52:30.920 people than with corpses the

00:52:33.060 work went on for many nights at

00:52:34.440 adak and that is how the moral

00:52:36.440 political unity of our party was

00:52:38.080 achieved

00:52:38.560 if you have a rigid belief

00:52:44.340 system and that's what an

00:52:45.380 ideology is because its axioms

00:52:47.580 are such that it encompasses all

00:52:49.220 of reality and then there are

00:52:50.680 details left outside that don't

00:52:52.460 seem to fit into that reality

00:52:54.040 well then you ignore them but

00:52:55.580 what if they're embodied what if

00:52:57.260 there are people who are

00:52:58.120 objecting to the way you think

00:52:59.360 well the equivalent to repressing

00:53:02.120 evidence that runs contrary to

00:53:04.120 your theory is the murder of

00:53:05.960 people who object to what you

00:53:07.380 say and those two things are

00:53:09.580 linked much tighter than you

00:53:10.740 would think you know you might

00:53:12.580 think well I would never do

00:53:13.840 something like the communists did

00:53:15.260 in in in in in the what the

00:53:19.440 evangelization of my beliefs but

00:53:22.780 the truth of the matter is is

00:53:24.080 that in general people will do

00:53:26.800 such things if they're granted the

00:53:29.400 opportunity and provided with the

00:53:31.280 proper apparatus this is frankel

00:53:38.600 from his accounts of the

00:53:40.220 concentration camps under nazi

00:53:42.500 germany the most ghastly moment of

00:53:45.100 the 24 hours of camp life was the

00:53:46.820 awakening when at a still

00:53:48.720 nocturnal hour the three shrill

00:53:50.360 blows of a whistle tore us

00:53:52.080 pitilessly from our exhausted sleep

00:53:53.800 and from the longings in our dreams

00:53:55.820 we then began the tussle with our

00:53:57.980 wet shoes into which we could

00:53:59.980 scarcely force our feet which were

00:54:01.740 sore and swollen with edema and

00:54:04.780 then there were the usual moans and

00:54:06.240 groans about petty trouble such as

00:54:07.800 the snapping of wires which

00:54:09.340 replaced shoelaces one morning I

00:54:11.360 heard someone whom I knew to be

00:54:12.600 brave and dignified cry like a

00:54:14.560 child because he finally had to go

00:54:16.740 out to the snowy marching fields in

00:54:18.180 his bare feet as the shoes were too

00:54:20.080 shrunken for him to wear in those

00:54:22.820 ghastly moments I found a little bit

00:54:25.140 of comfort a small piece of bread

00:54:27.340 which I drew out of my pocket and

00:54:29.360 munched with absorbed delight

00:54:31.360 solzhenitsyn

00:54:34.480 many of the gulag camps contain two

00:54:40.520 classes of prisoners rapists murderers

00:54:43.840 and thieves were very well organized

00:54:45.820 in russia and the soviet union and

00:54:47.700 political prisoners and because the

00:54:49.460 soviets believed that the reason that

00:54:52.060 people were thieves murderers and

00:54:53.600 rapists was because of the appalling

00:54:55.520 sociological conditions that they

00:54:57.820 grew up into they believed they were

00:55:00.440 socially friendly elements who could

00:55:02.300 still be redeemed so they put them in

00:55:05.280 charge of the camps and so the

00:55:07.520 political prisoners were at the bottom

00:55:09.100 of the hierarchy the prisoners ran the

00:55:13.100 camps with minimal supervision and the

00:55:16.620 camps were often forced labor camps and

00:55:19.400 forced labor meant do something difficult

00:55:21.740 and pointless until you die it didn't

00:55:24.860 mean it meant only secondarily produce

00:55:28.740 something of potential value to the

00:55:30.340 state you saw this with nazi germany too

00:55:32.240 the nazis when they started to lose the

00:55:35.380 second world war they could have stopped

00:55:39.120 their holocaust machinations and used the

00:55:42.180 people they had imprisoned to build

00:55:44.120 implements to further the war effort which

00:55:45.980 they did to some degree so they could have

00:55:47.420 used them as slaves so this would be the

00:55:49.380 logic take the slaves make the munitions

00:55:52.380 win the war then after you've won the war

00:55:55.400 you can run around and mop everybody up

00:55:57.500 but that isn't what the nazis did when

00:55:59.480 they started to lose instead of doing what

00:56:02.000 you think would be rational in the pursuit

00:56:04.320 of what was hypothetically their goal they

00:56:07.820 amped up the killing and and took resources

00:56:11.420 away from the war itself and so the

00:56:14.160 conclusion that's reasonable to draw from

00:56:16.400 that is that the killing was the purpose

00:56:18.940 of the war all the rest of it was just

00:56:21.580 window dressing and exactly as a solzhenitsyn

00:56:25.260 described in the earlier quotes that i told

00:56:27.460 you was that ideology was only there to

00:56:29.780 allow the people who were fundamentally

00:56:31.240 motive motivated towards genocide and

00:56:33.360 destruction to pretend to themselves that

00:56:36.400 they hadn't become rotten to the absolute

00:56:38.220 core but when push came to shove and they

00:56:40.820 had to show where their allegiances lie they

00:56:43.960 weren't even they weren't even valid followers

00:56:47.660 of the nazi party because they put the

00:56:51.280 continued pursuit of death above their own

00:56:53.940 survival even as an ideology and that's how

00:56:56.840 ideology generates and part of the reason

00:56:58.800 for that is that the narrower the box that

00:57:01.940 you stuff yourself into the weaker your

00:57:05.160 character becomes because there's nothing

00:57:07.500 left of you you're just a shell that has

00:57:09.800 demons in it and but you're still the sort

00:57:12.200 of thing that can suffer and so if you cram

00:57:14.420 everything you are into a box a small

00:57:16.960 tight box and you get rid of everything

00:57:19.060 that doesn't fit you get rid of everything

00:57:20.960 in you that makes life bearable and then

00:57:23.100 life becomes unbearable and then if life

00:57:25.320 becomes unbearable well then of course

00:57:27.020 you're motivated to do nothing but to take

00:57:28.740 revenge on it because why wouldn't you if

00:57:32.120 all you were doing was suffering stupidly and

00:57:34.700 meaninglessly how could you positively how

00:57:37.700 could you possibly show a positive face to

00:57:40.320 yourself and to the rest of humanity in cold

00:57:43.820 lower than 60 degrees below zero work days

00:57:47.100 were written off in other words on such days

00:57:50.340 the records showed that the workers had not

00:57:52.280 gone out to work they were often digging

00:57:54.540 canals on the frozen siberian prairie by hand

00:58:00.380 there was one canal i think it was on the

00:58:03.780 volga river but i can't remember precisely

00:58:06.860 so stalin killed 300 000 people in a single

00:58:11.480 winter digging it by hand and when it was

00:58:14.880 done it was so shallow that no ships could

00:58:16.840 use it

00:58:17.300 the record showed that the workers had not

00:58:21.520 gone out to work but they chased them out

00:58:22.960 anyway and whatever they squeezed out of

00:58:24.480 them on those days was added to the other

00:58:26.000 days thereby raising the percentages and the

00:58:29.020 servile medical section wrote off those who

00:58:31.360 froze to death on such cold days on some

00:58:33.480 other basis and the ones who were left who

00:58:35.260 could no longer walk and were straining every

00:58:37.460 sinew to crawl along and all fours on the

00:58:39.340 way back to camp the convoy simply shot so

00:58:42.160 that they wouldn't escape before they could

00:58:43.480 come back to get them

00:58:44.380 this is from william blake

00:58:47.880 oh rose though art sick the invisible worm

00:58:51.840 that flies in the night in the howling storm

00:58:54.520 have found out thy bed of crimson joy and

00:58:58.060 his dark secret love does thy life destroy

00:59:00.460 this is solzhenitsyn fire fire the branches

00:59:07.120 crackle in the night wind of late autumn

00:59:08.820 blows the flame of the bonfire back and

00:59:10.700 forth the compound is dark i'm alone at the

00:59:14.100 bonfire and i can bring it still some more

00:59:16.360 carpenter shavings this compound here is a

00:59:18.680 privileged one so privileged that it's

00:59:21.280 almost as if i were out in freedom this is an

00:59:23.680 island of paradise this is the marfino

00:59:25.940 shirashka a scientific institute staffed by

00:59:30.020 engineers

00:59:30.560 staffed with prisoners in its most privileged

00:59:34.620 period no one is overseeing me calling me to

00:59:37.380 a cell chasing me away from the bonfire and

00:59:39.660 even then it is chilly in the penetrating

00:59:41.880 wind but she

00:59:43.520 who has already been standing in the wind for

00:59:46.360 hours her arms straight down her head drooping

00:59:49.740 weeping and then growing numb and still and

00:59:52.800 then again she begs piteously citizen chief

00:59:55.720 please forgive me i won't do it again

00:59:58.260 the wind carries her moan to me just as if she

01:00:02.820 were moaning next to my ear

01:00:03.960 the citizen chief at the gatehouse fires up

01:00:07.380 his stove and does not answer this was the

01:00:10.520 gatehouse of the camp next door to us from

01:00:12.420 which workers came into our compound to lay

01:00:14.640 water pipes and repair the old ramshackle

01:00:17.380 seminary building across from me beyond the

01:00:21.560 artfully intertwined many stranded barbed wire

01:00:24.040 barricade and two steps away from the gatehouse

01:00:26.560 beneath a bright lantern stood the punished girl

01:00:29.720 head hanging the wind tugging at her gray work skirt

01:00:33.300 her feet growing numb from the cold

01:00:35.720 and a thin scarf over her head it had been warm during the day

01:00:41.000 when they had been digging a ditch on our territory

01:00:43.100 and another girl slipping down into a ravine had crawled her way to the

01:00:47.100 vladikino highway and escaped the guard had bungled and moscow city buses ran

01:00:52.980 right along the highway when they caught on it was too late to catch her

01:00:56.440 they raised the alarm a mean dark major arrived and shouted that if they failed

01:01:02.280 to catch the girl the entire camp would be deprived of visits and parcels

01:01:05.640 for a whole month because of her escape

01:01:08.080 and the women brigateers went into a rage and they were all shouting

01:01:12.620 one of them in particular who kept viciously rolling her eyes

01:01:16.420 oh i hope they catch her the bitch i hope they take scissors and

01:01:20.200 clip clip take off all her hair in front of the lineup

01:01:23.560 this wasn't something she had thought of herself this is the way they punished

01:01:27.480 women in the gulag but the girl who was now standing outside the gatehouse in

01:01:30.900 the cold had sighed and said instead at least she can have a good time out in

01:01:36.420 freedom for all of us the jailer overheard what she said and now she was

01:01:40.160 being punished everyone else had been taken off to the camp but she had been

01:01:44.040 set outside there to stand at attention in front of the gatehouse this had been

01:01:48.080 at 6 p.m and it was now 11 p.m she tried to shift from one foot to another but the

01:01:54.200 guard struck out his head and shouted stand at attention whore or it will be

01:01:59.500 worse for you and now she was not moving only weeping forgive me citizen chief let

01:02:06.900 me into the camp i won't do it anymore but even in the camp no one was about to

01:02:12.680 say to her all right idiot come on in the reason they were keeping her out

01:02:16.720 there so long was that the next day was sunday and and she would not be needed

01:02:20.460 for work such a straw blonde naive uneducated slip of a girl she had been

01:02:28.920 imprisoned for some spool of thread what a dangerous thought you expressed

01:02:34.280 their little sister they want to teach you a lesson for the rest of your life

01:02:38.760 fire fire we fought the war we looked into the bonfires to see what kind of

01:02:46.220 victory it would be the wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire

01:02:50.420 to that flame in you girl i promise the whole wide world will read about you

01:02:56.660 from milton this is from paradise lost milton wrote paradise lost just before the

01:03:04.900 rise of the nation states and milton also had the intuition that there was

01:03:09.520 something wrong with rationality and he identified rationality with the

01:03:14.280 mythology of satan and in the mythology of satan satan was

01:03:17.960 represented as the highest angel in god's heavenly kingdom so you can think

01:03:23.960 about that as the highest psychological function who had rebelled against god and

01:03:28.340 that and was then cast into hell and the idea there's an idea that's being

01:03:32.560 expressed by milton he was he was one of the most he was one of the foremost

01:03:37.520 poetic geniuses of the english language milton and shakespeare and what milton was

01:03:42.840 trying to understand was what is the nature of evil and his representation

01:03:48.340 gathered up the dreamlike theories of evil that had been collected around all of

01:03:54.040 western civilization for thousands of years and his hypothesis was this

01:03:57.680 evil is the force that believes that its knowledge is complete and that it can do

01:04:04.580 without the transcendent and as soon as it makes that claim it

01:04:08.080 instantly exists in a place that's indistinguishable from hell and it could

01:04:14.180 get out merely by admitting its error and it will never do that

01:04:18.160 for whence but from the author of all ill could spring so deep a malice

01:04:25.760 to confound the race of mankind in one root

01:04:28.560 and earth with hell to mingle and involve done all to spite the great creator

01:04:33.780 this is from richard the third shakespeare i shall despair there is no creature

01:04:42.800 loves me and if i die no soul will pity me

01:04:45.620 nay wherefore should they since that i myself find in myself no pity to myself

01:04:51.220 solzhenitsyn describes the reactions and actions of communist party members who

01:04:58.820 were devoured by the system because that often happened

01:05:00.940 the the the prison system the gulag system was very indiscriminating

01:05:05.620 you could land there for good reasons or bad and the bad reasons were probably

01:05:09.600 better because the punishment was more severe if you were imprisoned for your

01:05:13.400 innocence and communist party members often got

01:05:16.360 vacuumed up and this was ontologically and existentially intolerable for them

01:05:20.920 because they committed their whole soul to the ideological dogma and then

01:05:24.960 its its tyrannical aspect picked them up and destroyed them like they were worth

01:05:29.780 nothing to say that things were painful for them is to say almost nothing they

01:05:34.740 were incapable of assimilating such a blow

01:05:37.340 such a downfall and from their own people too from their own dear party

01:05:41.400 the typical arrest was you're at home with your family

01:05:45.220 in your bed and it's three o'clock in the morning

01:05:48.120 and the doors kick down and they take you out of your bed in whatever you happen to

01:05:52.860 be wearing and they tell you to say goodbye to your family and give you like

01:05:56.240 25 seconds to pack and then you're gone and no one sees you again they take you

01:06:02.240 to the prison they take off all your clothes they shave your head

01:06:05.780 they have you pick out some random clothes from a pile of clothes

01:06:08.940 hopefully they don't fit and then you're tried you confess if you will and

01:06:14.860 you're off to the prison camp to say that things were painful for them is

01:06:18.860 to say almost nothing they were incapable of assimilating such a blow

01:06:22.260 such a downfall and from their own people too from their own dear party and

01:06:27.160 from all appearances for nothing at all after all they had been guilty of nothing

01:06:31.560 as far as the party was concerned nothing at all it was painful to them to

01:06:36.580 such a degree that it was considered taboo among them

01:06:39.680 uncomradely to ask what were you imprisoned for

01:06:43.060 they were the only squeamish generation of prisoners the rest of us with our

01:06:47.260 tongues hanging out couldn't wait to tell the story to every chance

01:06:50.440 newcomer we met and to the whole cell as if it were an anecdote

01:06:53.700 here's the sort of people they were

01:06:57.640 olga sliosberg's husband had already been arrested

01:07:01.140 and they had come to carry out a search and arrest her too the search lasted four

01:07:05.460 hours and she spent those four hours sorting out the minutes

01:07:09.780 of the congress of the bristle and brush industry

01:07:13.220 of which she had been the secretary until the previous day

01:07:16.240 the incomplete state of the minutes troubled her more than her children who

01:07:20.220 she was now leaving forever even the interrogator conducting the

01:07:24.100 search could not resist telling her come on now

01:07:26.440 say farewell to your children here's the sort of people they were

01:07:31.280 a letter from her 15 year old daughter came to

01:07:34.740 yelizaveta tsetkova in the kazan prison for long-term prisoners

01:07:39.160 mama tell me write to me are you guilty or not

01:07:43.500 i hope you weren't guilty because then i won't join the komsomol

01:07:46.920 which was the young communist organization and i won't forgive them

01:07:50.560 because of you but if you're guilty i won't write you anymore and i will hate

01:07:54.800 you and the mother was stricken by remorse in

01:07:57.320 her damp grave-like cell with its dim little lamp

01:08:00.420 how could her daughter live without the komsomol

01:08:03.300 how could she be permitted to hate soviet power

01:08:06.520 better that she should hate me and so she wrote i am guilty

01:08:10.200 enter the komsomol how could it be anything but hard

01:08:14.580 it was more than the human heart could bear

01:08:16.680 to fall beneath the beloved axe and then to have to justify its wisdom

01:08:21.680 but that's the price a man pays for entrusting his god-given soul to human

01:08:25.760 dogma even today any orthodox communist will

01:08:29.100 affirm that tsetkova acted correctly

01:08:30.920 even today they cannot be convinced that this is precisely

01:08:34.260 quote the perversion of small forces that the mother perverted her daughter and

01:08:40.360 harmed her soul here's the sort of people they were

01:08:42.820 yt gave sincere testimony against her husband

01:08:46.100 anything to aid the party oh how one could pity them

01:08:50.300 if they at least had come to comprehend their former wretchedness

01:08:54.460 this whole chapter could have been written quite differently

01:08:57.000 if today at least they had forsaken their earlier views

01:08:59.880 but it happened the way maria danielin had dreamed it would

01:09:03.140 if i leave here someday i'm going to live as if nothing had taken place

01:09:08.320 loyalty in our view it's just plain pig-headedness

01:09:12.360 those devotees to the theories of development

01:09:15.400 construed loyalty to that development to mean renunciation to any personal

01:09:19.120 development whatsoever

01:09:20.220 as nikolai adamovich vilanchuk said after serving 17 years

01:09:25.240 we believed in the party and we were not mistaken

01:09:28.480 is this loyalty or pig-headedness

01:09:31.440 no it was not for show and not out of hypocrisy

01:09:34.300 hypocrisy that they argued in the cells in defense of all the government's actions

01:09:37.920 they needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own rightness

01:09:42.220 otherwise insanity was not far off

01:09:45.880 this is from paradise lost

01:09:48.880 so in this scene satan is cast into hell

01:09:55.580 and it's because of his rebellion against

01:09:57.940 the transcendent

01:10:00.420 his idea that he himself is sufficient

01:10:03.440 this is his statement to his crew

01:10:07.040 farewell happy fields

01:10:08.820 where joy forever dwells

01:10:11.940 hail horrors

01:10:13.100 hail infernal world

01:10:14.580 and thou profundest hell

01:10:15.980 receive thy new possessor

01:10:18.120 one who brings a mind

01:10:20.540 not to be changed by place or time

01:10:23.120 the mind is its own place

01:10:25.920 and in itself can make a heaven of hell

01:10:27.720 or hell of heaven

01:10:28.920 what matters where

01:10:30.220 if i be still the same

01:10:32.020 and what i should be

01:10:34.580 all but less than he whom thunder

01:10:36.740 hath made greater

01:10:37.680 here at least we shall be free

01:10:39.660 the almighty hath not built here for his envy

01:10:42.640 will not drive us hence

01:10:43.900 here we may reign secure

01:10:45.820 and in my choice

01:10:47.620 to reign is worth ambition

01:10:50.160 though in hell

01:10:51.560 better to reign in hell than serve in heaven

01:10:54.220 the existentialists of the late 19th century

01:10:58.620 attempted to diagnose

01:11:00.620 the pathology of the human personality

01:11:04.020 at a deeper level i believe

01:11:06.080 than anyone else had ever attempted

01:11:07.780 and their fundamental conclusion was that

01:11:11.660 the destruction by rationality of the evolved systems of meaning

01:11:19.580 that people had

01:11:20.520 previously lived within

01:11:23.760 had underbind

01:11:27.020 the psychological strength of each individual

01:11:31.500 divorced from their own history

01:11:34.620 that led them to be

01:11:37.720 to gravitate towards either nihilism

01:11:40.540 or as a counterposition to gravitate towards totalitarianism

01:11:44.860 the whole 20th century played out the

01:11:49.800 pendulum swing between nihilism and totalitarianism

01:11:53.540 and in the background the existentialists

01:11:55.940 and the psychodynamic theorists

01:11:57.860 were putting forward a theory

01:11:59.500 which was that

01:12:00.600 if people lived up

01:12:02.580 to their own possibility

01:12:04.760 and held on to their own experience

01:12:07.360 as if it were true

01:12:08.660 and did not substitute for that

01:12:10.780 ideological and consensual beliefs

01:12:14.520 that it would be possible

01:12:17.100 for each person to find a wellspring of meaning

01:12:20.200 that would be a sufficient replacement

01:12:22.180 for what had been lost historically

01:12:23.960 without having to fall into the pitfalls of nihilism

01:12:27.440 or totalitarianism

01:12:28.480 so you might say well

01:12:29.900 nihilism well that's one thing

01:12:33.620 because mostly that affects you

01:12:35.100 although if you're nihilistic

01:12:36.400 then everyone around you is going to be pulled down as well

01:12:38.640 but totalitarianism is a whole different issue

01:12:41.460 because what we know now is that

01:12:43.200 once things become ideologically totalitarian

01:12:46.500 the next step is mass murder

01:12:48.680 and it's

01:12:50.580 the next step is mass murder

01:12:52.140 in a manner that makes it appear

01:12:54.120 that the purpose for the ideological rigidification

01:12:57.040 to begin with

01:12:57.980 was the opportunity

01:12:59.000 to participate in mass murder

01:13:01.020 so you know how Hitler died

01:13:03.600 Hitler lost faith in the German people

01:13:06.780 because they were losing the war

01:13:09.580 and so he concluded in the waning stages of World War II

01:13:14.900 that Germany should just be destroyed in fire

01:13:17.820 and everything else that he could possibly consume

01:13:20.640 would go with him

01:13:21.300 and so he died in a bunker underneath Berlin

01:13:23.560 when it was in flames he committed suicide

01:13:25.880 when Europe was in flames

01:13:27.760 and Hitler was a worshipper of the kind of fire that purifies

01:13:31.560 he used that mythology of cleansing fire

01:13:35.540 to enter into a terrible pact

01:13:39.000 with the entire nation that he followed and led

01:13:43.280 and Stalin

01:13:44.460 Stalin didn't just kill individuals that he pulled off the streets

01:13:50.620 he killed like all the engineers and all the doctors

01:13:54.140 because he believed they were wreckers

01:13:55.760 they killed all the good farmers

01:13:58.160 they killed 6 million Ukrainians

01:14:01.240 they moved whole nations of people into Siberia

01:14:04.360 and let them die

01:14:05.620 and there's every bit of evidence there is

01:14:10.420 suggests that what Stalin was doing

01:14:12.720 was practicing murderous genocide

01:14:16.180 on an ever larger scale

01:14:18.420 and hoping that it would culminate in a thermonuclear war

01:14:23.100 and we escaped that just by a thread

01:14:27.260 the existentialists make the claim

01:14:31.320 which I think is a remarkable and powerful claim

01:14:34.480 that the way out of those catastrophic situations

01:14:39.500 is not through political action per se

01:14:43.860 or it's not going to be resolved by one party defeating another

01:14:48.180 or one position defeating another

01:14:49.900 that's a continuation of the same process that produces the problem

01:14:55.000 the existential and the psychodynamic answer to this problem

01:15:01.700 is that it's more a disease of the soul than a disease of the state

01:15:05.460 and that the way to address it

01:15:07.900 is to ensure that you live in a manner

01:15:10.180 that makes you neither nihilistic

01:15:12.760 nor susceptible to ideological possession

01:15:16.020 Solzhenitsyn

01:15:18.680 and other thinkers like him

01:15:22.220 like Frankl

01:15:24.500 believed that society was a macrocosm of the individual

01:15:30.180 not the other way around

01:15:33.060 not that the individual is a sub-element of society

01:15:35.660 believed that the choice that each individual made

01:15:39.580 was potentially so powerful

01:15:41.840 in relationship to pathological behavior

01:15:44.400 or honest

01:15:45.600 or honest and thoughtful behavior

01:15:48.260 that

01:15:48.500 a single individual properly developed

01:15:51.660 could stand up against a tyranny and win

01:15:53.780 and it seems to me

01:15:56.080 and I thought about this for a very long time

01:15:58.040 that the lesson of the 20th century is

01:16:00.660 that a single individual

01:16:03.520 can stand up against

01:16:05.360 a tyrant and win

01:16:08.020 and each of us are single individuals

01:16:11.440 and the danger of tyranny

01:16:13.340 and the danger of nihilism are not past

01:16:16.240 and so as inheritors of the catastrophic legacy

01:16:21.680 of the 20th century

01:16:23.020 and as inhabitants of the new millennium

01:16:26.160 part of your responsibility

01:16:28.800 is to live your own life

01:16:31.460 and to live it honestly

01:16:33.460 and to pay attention to your own experience

01:16:35.680 and not take the easy way out

01:16:38.020 that ideological systems offer you

01:16:40.400 they're destined to transform themselves

01:16:43.560 into rigid and murderous pathologies

01:16:45.780 and you offload your responsibility

01:16:48.500 for thinking and acting to them

01:16:50.980 and then you have to ask yourself

01:16:54.040 well what are they?

01:16:57.320 well all the evidence suggests

01:16:58.860 that they're not the sort of thing

01:17:00.140 that you want to have in your head

01:17:01.560 and they're not the sight of doing it

01:17:03.000 again

01:17:03.720 thank you

01:17:04.880 thank you

01:17:05.240 thank you

01:17:06.440 applause

01:17:06.700 applause

01:17:21.160 applause

01:17:23.240 ¶¶

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - October 25, 2020

142. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Existentialism)

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