https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=DKpibvZhr4k
So I would say with regards to fiction if you take someone like Dostoevsky Who I think is a favorite of mine by the way I would highly recommend that you read all five of his great novels because they are unparalleled in their psychological depth And so if you’re interested in psychology Dostoevsky is the person for you Tolstoy is more of a sociologist But Dostoevsky man he gets right down into the bottom of the questions and messes around transformative reading anyways Dostoevsky’s characters this character named Raskolnikov is a character in Crime and punishment and Raskolnikov is a materialist rationalist I would say Which was a rather new type of person back in the 1880s and he was sort of taken by the idea that God was dead and And convinced himself that the only reason that he that anyone acted in a moral way in a traditional way was because of cowardice They were unable to remove from them the restrictions of mere convention and act in the manner of Someone who rose above the norm and so he’s tortured by these ideas. He’s half-starving He’s a law student. He doesn’t have enough to eat He’s half-starving he’s a law student He doesn’t have enough to eat he doesn’t have much money And so you know he’s not thinking all that clearly either and he’s got a lot of family problems His mother’s sick and she can’t send him much money and his sister is planning to Engage in a marriage that’s loveless to someone who’s rather tyrannical Who he she hopes will provide the family with enough money so that he can continue in law school And they write him brave letters telling him that she’s very much in love with this guy But he is smart enough to read between the lines and realizes that his sister Is just planning to prostitute herself in you know in an altruistic manner He’s not very happy with that and then at the same time as all this is happening He becomes aware of this pawnbroker who he’s you know pawning his last possessions to and she’s a Horrible person and Not only by his estimation She pawns a lot of things for the neighborhood and people really don’t like her She’s grasping and cruel and deceitful and and resentful and like and she has this niece Who’s not very bright intellectually impaired whom she basically treats as a slave and beats all the time and so Raskolnikov You know involved in this mess And half-starved and a bit delirious And possessed of these strange new nihilistic ideas decides that The best way out of this situation would be just to kill the land the pawnbroker take her wealth Which she all she does is keep it in a chest Free the niece so that seems like a good idea so remove one Apparently horrible and useless person from the world free his sister from the necessity of this loveless marriage And allow him to go to law school where he can become educated and do some good for the world you know, so one of the things that’s lovely about dostoevsky is that He you know when sometimes when one person is arguing against another or when they’re having an argument in their head They make their opponent into a straw man Which is basically they take their opponent and caricature their perspective and try to make it as weak as possible and And laugh about it and and then they come up with their argument destroy the straw man and feel that they’ve obtained victory But it’s a very pathetic way of thinking it’s not thinking at all What thinking is is when you adopt? the opposite position from your suppositions and you make that argument as strong as you can possibly make it and then you pit your perspective against that That that strong Iron man not the straw man and you argue it out you battle it out and that’s what dostoevsky does in his novels. I mean he’s the people who stand for the antithesis of what dostoevsky dostoevsky actually believes are often the strongest smartest and sometimes most admirable people in the book and so he takes great moral courage to do that and You know in Raskolnikov what he wanted to do was set up a character who had every reason to commit murder every reasonable reason philosophically practically ethically even well, so Raskolnikov goes and He kills the old lady with an axe And it doesn’t go the way he expects it will because what he finds out is that Post-murder Raskolnikov and pre-murder Raskolnikov are not the same people at all They’re not even close to the same people. He’s entered an entirely different universe and dostoevsky does a lovely job of describing that universe of horror and chaos and and and deception and and and suffering and terror and all of that and he doesn’t even use the money he just buries it in a In an alley as fast as he can and then doesn’t want anything to do with it again and anyways, the reason i’m telling you all this is Potentially to entice you into reading the book because it is an amazing amazing book but also because you might say well is risk is what happened to Raskolnikov true are the Stories in that book true and the answer to that is well from a factual perspective clearly they’re untrue But then if you think of Raskolnikov as the embodiment of a particular type of person who lived at that time And the embodiment of a certain kind of ideology which had swept across europe and really invaded russia and which was actually a precursor a philosophical precursor to the russian revolution Then Raskolnikov is more real than any one person. He’s like a composite person. He’s like a person whose observancies have been eliminated for the purpose of Relating something about the structure of the world and so I like to think of those things as sort of meta real Meta real they’re more real than real