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And we know that sin means to miss the mark and so we know that whatever has happened in Sodom and Gomorrah means that something about the natural ethical order of things has been seriously violated and there’s a strong intimation in the Old Testament, which I think by the way is completely correct that if the proper order of being is violated and that’s something like the balance between chaos and order say if the proper balance of being is violated then all hell will break loose and one of the things I can tell you from reading a very From reading a very comprehensive set of myths from around the world is that that’s a conclusion that human beings have come to everywhere Stay on the goddamn path and be careful Because if you start to mess around and you deviate especially if you know that you’re deviating Things are not going to go well for you and that idea is everywhere And I think it’s it right I think the idea is right because there aren’t that many ways of doing things right and there’s a lot of ways of doing things Wrong and if you do things wrong the consequences of doing them wrong can be truly catastrophic You know one of the things I learned from reading Viktor Frankl First but then Alexander Solzhenitsyn who I think did a deeper job was that and and Vaklav Havel thought the same thing That These people were very much trying to understand what happened in places like Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is a particularly good Analysis of what happened in the Soviet Union and his conclusion and it’s a 2100 page conclusion And it’s like hammered home with a hammer It’s it’s a book that everyone should read you know assuming that you can read a 2100 page scream Because that’s basically what it is You know first of all what he does is document just how terrible things were in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 And no matter how terrible you think they were unless you know the stories They were a lot more terrible than that and they were terrible Personally because everyone lied they were terrible in families because Two out of five people were government informers. They were terrible among friends because no one could tell each other the truth They were terrible socially because the whole system was corrupt and ran on slave labor and they were terrible philosophically because the doctrine of man upon which the state was founded was hopeless and nihilistic and and they were murderous destructive and Genocidal it’s like they got it wrong at every single level of analysis Simultaneously and the question is why and Solzhenitsyn’s answer and to some degree Victor Frankl’s answer as well and Vaklov Havel and I would say also Nelson Mandela and Gandhi they all they all ended up in the same Conceptual sphere and the answer was because individual people lived crooked lives because individual people swallowed lies and spoke them and didn’t stand up for the truth and The corruption that spread from each individual pulled the entire state mechanism into that corruption and made everything into hell You know there are other theories obedience right that’s kind of the Milgram idea from that it’s easy to make human beings obedient to people in authority and I’ve explored that idea quite a bit with regards to what happens happened for example in the Nazi concentration camps and Yes, you can set circumstances up so that people are Likely to be obedient to orders that are pathological. There’s no doubt about that and yes Sometimes that’s indicative of the weakness of their character But that’s not the issue and the idea that what happened in Nazi Germany was because a Population of good people listened to a tiny minority of bad people. That’s a really that’s really not a good theory the the The Nazi ethos was there at every single level of the social organization right right from the personal Right from the personal right from the familial all the way up to the leadership It was the same thing all the way up and all the way down and the same thing in the Soviet Union and so Well so If you miss the mark which is apparently what the people of Sodom and Gomorrah did Their sin was grievous then they risked destruction and I just cannot see how after the 20th century Anybody with any sense could possibly not see that as true and I think that there’s a line in the Old Testament, you know that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and I Can tell you one of the things that frightened me badly Was the realization from reading Solzhenitsyn and a variety of other things that I was reading at the same time that Dostoevsky as well because he makes the same point He said that a human being is not only responsible for everything they do but for everything that everyone else does Now you know that’s crazy, and he was an epileptic and a mystic and that’s a crazy thing to say But it’s also there’s something about it That’s true because if you were better the people around you would be less worse than they are and if you were good enough You don’t know how much better the people around you would be and so there’s this idea too, you know that Christ took the That Christ took the sins of the world unto himself, that’s a complicated idea man I wrestled with that one for a very long time, but I think I figured out at least in part what it means it meant that It’s something like the realization of complete humanity you see to take the sins of the world unto yourself is to realize that Is to understand the Nazi concentration camp guard Because that person is human and so are you and so if you can’t see you in that Then you don’t know who you are and if you can see you in that Well, then you’ve started to take the sins of the world unto yourself because you’ve actually started to take responsibility For those terrible things you know I think it’s the motif of the the motto of the Holocaust Museum in Washington We must never forget that’s close And I think well you can’t forget you can’t remember what you don’t understand You will forget what you don’t understand and the question is well. What are you supposed to remember about the Holocaust? It was a historical event that six million people died That’s not what’s to remember what’s to remember is that’s what people can do and You’re one of them, and if you don’t understand that you could do that Then you don’t know who you are