https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=T_ijsSoNP2U
You know, you saw the same thing with Solzhenitsyn’s description of the gulags, because they were run in large part by the inmates. But I think that that’s a really good metaphor for totalitarian states in general, you know, because we like to think that a totalitarian state is made up of innocent oppressed individuals who are under the thumb of an evil tyrant and that all of the catastrophes are cascading from the top down, but I don’t think that that’s true. I think that it’s more like a holographic structure where the tyranny exists at every single level. So it exists psychologically and it exists within the family and it exists within the mid-level organizations. Well, you know in Eastern Germany, for example, one out of every three people was a government informer. So what that meant is if you had a family of six people that two of them you couldn’t trust and you can’t just say that that’s a consequence of the top-down structure. A tyranny is something that exists everywhere simultaneously once it gets a grip. And it’s easy for people to say things like, well, I was just following orders and you know, I’m not trying to put myself in a position where I’m claiming that if I was in that position I wouldn’t have followed orders in the same way. I mean God only knows till you get there, right? That’s for sure. But what that did to me was focus my attention more and more on the necessity of individual responsibility. I thought if it was individuals in the final analysis who were responsible for the great evils of the 20th century, which I think is a reasonable way of conceptualizing it, then it might be individuals who could be responsible for whatever good there might be in mankind that could help us avoid those situations in the future. And I thought of that as a alternative in some sense to nihilistic disbelief and ideological possession, you know, because if your group identity is too tight, then you start acting like they well, like a cog in a mob, that’s a very bad thing. But then if your group identity disappears completely, well, then you’re left alone and bereft. And so those are bad alternatives, right? You’re sort of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. And it was very difficult to understand that there might be a third path between those two. I couldn’t see the existence of anything because people need belief systems in order to exist, right, to maintain psychological stability and to maintain sociological stability as well. But then if the beliefs get too rigid, then they turn into a raging totalitarian mob. So maybe you let that go because you don’t want to play that game, but then you dissolve because you have no identity. That’s not acceptable either. When I first laid that out that clearly it was really hard on me because I couldn’t see a third path to that. But then I started to realize, and this was a consequence of reading the sorts of things that we already talked about, but also of starting to understand the underlying structure of mythology and what the heroic path meant essentially. And that meant adoption of supreme moral responsibility as an individual. Now there’s this idea in the New Testament, which is a really interesting idea. You know, it’s one of these bottomless ideas. And I mean that literally. You could study it forever and never get to the bottom of it. And the idea is that Christ is the person who takes the sins of mankind on himself. And there’s something redemptive about that. And that’s actually a really dark idea. Because what it means, as far as I can tell, what it means, at least what it means psychologically, is that when you read these terrible things, you have to understand that you’re reading about you. If you don’t understand that you’re reading about you, then you don’t actually understand the stories. You know, because you put yourself in the position where you’re automatically the good person who would never do anything like that. And then these other people are, well, they’re devils in some sense, right? And it’s very easy for people to make that division. But it’s a horrific realization when you think that that devil that you see outside is the same thing that’s inside, and that you don’t know until you’re put in a situation like that what you might do. And then it’s even worse because if you look at the historical evidence, you know, it was ordinary people in some sense that produced the catastrophes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and Maoist China. I mean, they might not have originated it, but they certainly had the option to say no at different parts of different steps along the way, and they didn’t, you know. And these things do happen one horrible thing at a time. There’s this great book called Ordinary Men, which describes the descent of a German police force from ordinary bourgeois middle-class men, essentially just ordinary policemen, who actually were raised before the Hitler youth. They weren’t indoctrinated, you know, as young people. And they were brought into Poland to sort of mop up after the Germans had walked through, and it describes how they descended into the sort of people who would take naked women out, naked pregnant pregnant women out into the middle of fields and shoot them in the back of the head. And what’s horrifying about the book is that the author, Browning, details the stages by which this occurred. And it’s, well, for example, the commander of this unit told the men that they were going to have to do terrible things, but that they could go home if they wanted to. And then you think, well, there’s an out, but then if you really think about it, you think, well, they’re a tightly knit, quasi-military organization, and one of the natural thoughts under that circumstance would be, well, I’m not going to leave my comrades to do all the dirty work. That would just be a matter of cowardice. And so you can see that, you know, that there’s an ethical requirement that would keep you there to begin with, and then they were… Well, you’re doing what you just said, which is taking the burden of this sinful activity on yourself. If you let everyone else do it, then you’re not acting heroically. Well, right. And so it was easy for the men to get entrapped into that, and then, you know, the requirements for their horrific action kept ramping up. And like each time they accepted the requirement of doing one horrific thing, the probability that they would accept the next requirement increased. And what is also really interesting about that book, Ordinary Men, is that it’s not like these men didn’t suffer. Like they were suffering terribly. They were physically ill. They were vomiting. They were tearing themselves apart psychologically, you know, but they didn’t quit. So that’s a great book, because if you want to know how you walk down the… how you can be enticed to walk down a terrible path, that’s the book to read. And it’s very frightening, because if you read it properly, then, you know, you have to read it again, as I said, as if you’re one of the people to whom this is happening. Not the victim, but the oppressor, you know. And I mean, you can also read it as the victim. That’s fair enough, but… But it’s ordinary people who participate in these things, and that’s a very, very terrifying thought. you