https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=8u3aTURVEC8
It’s possible that you guys have been following this political and economic news from the Ukraine. So, it says here that this is off CBC. In a clear warning to Ukraine, Putin on Wednesday ordered massive military exercises involving most of the military units in western Russia. On Thursday, as part of the exercises, fighter jets were put on combat alert and were patrolling the border, Russia’s Defence Ministry said in a statement. It didn’t specify the areas where patrol missions were being conducted. The military also announced measures to tighten security at the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet on the Crimean peninsula in southeastern Ukraine. There’s a rumour that I believe, I believe it was Brezhnev, gave the Crimea to the Ukraine when he was drunk. The military manoeuvres prompted a sharp rebuke from US Secretary of State John Kerry, who warned Russia that any military intervention in Ukraine would be a grave mistake. So, why did I tell you that? Well, it’s for the same reason that I’ve been conducting these last few lectures on phenomenological and existential ideas in psychotherapy. I think I mentioned to you that these ideas are often not covered anymore in personality classes, but I think that’s a big mistake because I think that these theories have more to tell us about what happened in the 20th century than any other theories that I’ve ever come across. And that’s very important because the terrible mass movements of the 20th century occurred because of the nature of people’s personality. And it’s a mistake to concentrate on, it’s a mistake not to concentrate on factors that play that massive a role in determining the destiny of the entire world. And, you know, it may seem to you that the Soviet Union is a long ways away since it collapsed in 1989, but there’s no evidence that we’re done with it yet. I mean, Putin was a KGB officer, and the KGB was the Soviet Secret Service, and the Soviet Secret Service was one catastrophically awful organization. And the tension that’s occurring in the Ukraine right now that looks like it might explode into civil war, and hopefully not, is still a consequence of the remnants of the pathologies that dominated the Soviet Union for most of the 20th century. It isn’t clear to me that we’ve really learned what we had to learn from what happened in Nazi Germany, say, and in Mao’s China, which is obviously still run by the Communist Party, or in the Soviet Union, even though there’s been a reprieve for the last 35 years or so. Nietzsche, in particular, predicted what was going to happen in the 20th century. I’m going to read you something that he wrote. I’m going to try to tell you today why the events in the 20th century happened, so the mass genocidal movements in particular, which were probably the defining characteristic of the 20th century. And then also, what that has to do with individual psychology. 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. 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. People fight over resources. And that never seemed reasonable to me because, first of all, obviously many wars are fought for other reasons than resources. Two Central American countries, I think it was Guatemala and Honduras, if I remember correctly, went to war over a soccer game. So the outcome of this was disputed. And even if you do think that the reason that groups of people engage in conflict are for economic reasons, that doesn’t exactly explain much because that doesn’t explain whether they’re fighting for because of absolute differences in wealth or because of relative discrepancies in wealth. And those are very, very different causal elements. And then even if people do fight for economic reasons, which means they’re fighting for things that they value, it isn’t exactly clear why people value what they value because different societies value different things. So economics, in the final analysis, ends up being a shallow explanation. And I pursued economic and political and sociological explanations for social conflict for a long time, but eventually they became uncomfortable. And that’s partly why I went and studied clinical psychology, because it struck me that the right level of analysis for understanding mass movements like the Nazi movement or the ideological possession that characterized the Stalinist Soviets or Mao’s communists or Paul Potts’ Cambodian communists or any of the dictators that you can talk about who are on the far left or the far right during the war. To me, those were failings of individual personality. And the most astute writers that I’ve ever read who described what they assumed to be the causes of these terrible conflicts made the same point, which is why I’m having you read Viktor Frankl and Alexander Solzhenitsyn because Solzhenitsyn is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very great one either must be silent or speak with greatness with greatness that means cynically and with innocence what I relate is the history of the next two centuries I Describe what is coming what can no longer come differently the advent of nihilism Nihilism is the belief in nothing Or the belief that things have no meaning our whole European culture is moving for some time now with a tortured Tension that is growing from decade to decade as towards a catastrophe Restlessly violently and headlong like a river that wants to reach the end that no longer reflects that is afraid to reflect He that speaks here has conversely done nothing so far But to reflect as a philosopher and solitary by instinct who has found his advantage in standing aside outside Why has the event advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence Because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals Because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value those values really had we require at some time new values Nihilism stands at the door Whence comes this uncanny est of all guests Point of departure It’s an error to consider social distress or Physiological degeneration or corruption of all things as the cause of nihilism Ours is the most honest and compassionate age So Nietzsche dispenses right away with sociological explanations for People’s lack of belief in meaning in life you know and what a lot of what you’re taught in universities is is Sociological in its causal thinking and the causal path is often It’s the social conditions that people find themselves in that determine their response to the world, but Nietzsche stands Violently against that perspective and this is a hundred and fifty years ago even before in some sense It was thoroughly well developed and the reason he stands against it is because he points out that Wherever you’re positioned in society your position can be made subject to any number of Individual interpretations It’s it’s meaning like the meaning of being poor say or the meaning of being comparatively poor isn’t a meaning that’s etched in stone And so it has to be interpreted psychologically before it can become a causal factor And if it can be interpreted psychologically, then it’s not a fact like the existence of a mountain is a fact. It’s still an interpretation He says distress itself whether psychic Psychological physical or intellectual also need not produce nihilism, so he also rejects suffering itself as a cause of nihilism Need not at all produce nihilism that is the radical rejection of value meaning and desirability such distress always permits a variety of interpretations rather It is in one particular interpretation the Christian moral one that nihilism is rooted The end of Christianity at the hands of its own morality which cannot be replaced which turns against the Christian God The sense of truthfulness highly developed by Christianity is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history To rebound from God is the truth to the fanatical faith all is false an act of Buddhism So it’s a strange interpretation because Nietzsche although he was violently anti-Christian in his in his in his what in his self presentation to the public was more like in my opinion was more like a beneficial critic of the of the Western Christian tradition and because the first thing he realized was that The domination of the West by essentially by the Catholic Church for something like 1900 years was necessary in order for For the European mind to become trained and focused so his point was that you and unless you learn to place an interpretive scheme on the world and Interpret that world in a coherent manner through that scheme. You don’t have a trained mind and And for Nietzsche in some sense it didn’t really matter what the interpretive scheme was It was just that at some point you had to discipline yourself This would be something like a post adolescent process you had to discipline yourself By developing an adherence to some sort of coherent deep coherent view and the consequence of that at least in principle could be that you Would be this you could come to be the sort of person that would that would be A respectful of the truth and also someone who was it who regarded truth as a As a moral virtue as a higher order moral virtue But then Nietzsche’s point was that Christianity developed that sense in Europe to such a degree that The spirit of truth-seeking went after the axioms of Christianity and demolished them that was his view of what happened During the Enlightenment as a consequence of the interaction between science and religion so Nietzsche’s view was that The modern mind will say because we’re speaking 150 years later the modern mind had been trained rigorously to interpret things through a coherent Structure and then once that training had Occurred then it could use any number of coherent structures And then it could also use its its ability to form a relationship with the truth to criticize the very thing that gave rise to that mind and that and that’s Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the 20th century individual The pursuit of truth itself had undermined the structure that gave birth to the pursuit of truth and that left people wide open It left them wide open on the one hand to nihilism and nihilism is the belief that nothing has meaning Nothing has any final meaning and you the best way of expressing nihilism is what the hell difference is it going to make in a Thousand years what we do today or in a hundred years for that matter and it’s a read It’s a rational reduction of all of the experiences of life to to to Rational insignificance nothing has any final meaning and so the question of course that emerges from that is well Why do anything on a deeper question that emerges for that from that is well? Why bear suffering and? But that’s not the only problem from an existential point of view because the Existentialists and Nietzsche as well also believed that nihilism was actually unbearable Because people suffer they have to have a framework of meaning in which to place the suffering because otherwise it undermines their ability to live and then and and and people can’t move forward in that condition and so another one of Nietzsche’s prognostications was that Nihilism would produce its counterpart which was totalitarianism and people would leap from their immersion saying in in in evolutionarily emergent systems of faith and Jump headlong into rational Utopian constructions of reality Because you because people can’t do without an interpretive framework So it wasn’t as if the consequence of moving beyond religion was going to be a step into enlightenment, which is what? materialist rationalists always presume they presume if you could just shed the superstitious claptrap that’s associated with your religious heritage you’d instantly be enlightened, but Nietzsche’s point was that is not what’s likely to happen what’s likely to happen is two things people will either give up on life completely and become cynical prematurely cynical which is certainly a disease of of young people and Maybe it’s always been a disease of young people, but it’s certainly been a disease of young people since say the end of World War two So they become nihilistic and not believe that anything has any meaning and that undermines their ability to strive or they’d fall prey to some sort of rigid ideology and Nietzsche also understood that if people fell prey to a religion to a rigid ideology or several rigid ideologies that the only plausible outcome of that would be Exceptionally intense warfare and of course that’s exactly what happened in the 20th century Now Nietzsche also says This can’t be reversed skepticism regarding morality is what is decisive the end of the moral interpretation of the world Which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into some beyond leads to nihilism all lacks meaning Many says the untenability of one interpretation of the world Upon which a tremendous amount of energy has been lavished Awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false so it’s a brilliant observation because he his point is I’ve seen this in in Fundamentalist Christians for example who I’ve taught in the past because I have a very biological view of things and these people I met more of them when I was in the United States they were more intelligent than Then they were wise meaning The constraints within which their intellect was forced to operate which would be the Christian fundamentalist constraints Were not sophisticated enough to encapsulate their intellect they were too smart for their own theories, so they come to university and and and Be exposed to ideas that were outside the scope say of Christian fundamentalism would just blow their fundamentalist Presuppositions into bits and so then of course they fall into nothing, but Nietzsche says it’s even worse than that It’s not only that you fall into nothing. It’s that once one of your systems of belief has been destroyed You also learn that systems of beliefs themselves are unreliable And so you can’t just move easily from one to another because it’s like Well, you’re in a boat, and it’s sunk and now you know that if you jump to the next boat that boat could also sink So it’s it’s not only that your boat has sunk It’s now you know that all boats can sink and so that’s part of the position of the modern person as far as Nietzsche was Concerned is that every one of us knows at least in principle that all the boats that we want to jump into could potentially sink And so Nietzsche saw nihilism as the inevitable consequence The inevitable rational consequence of that realization now. I told you guys before Nisha was a very very influential person he influenced influenced Heidegger and Heidegger influenced Bingswanger and boss But Nietzsche also influenced Young as much as Freud did and Jung spent his whole career Trying to solve the question that Nietzsche posed one of the questions was Because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these values really had so The collapse of a belief system makes all the values within it No longer tenable that that’s the meaning of Nietzsche’s statement that God is dead. He said if you take the central axiom out of a System of belief you can’t hold on to all the things that were derived from that axiom so here an example is this so for example In in modern Western law there’s a presupposition And the presupposition is that in some weird sense everyone is equal before the law And that’s predicated on the idea that not even applies to someone who’s a murderer for your murderer and you and it’s known You have to be treated with respect. You know you have to be treated with respect by the legal system, and that’s a very very strange It’s a miracle that something like that ever emerged because it’s so unlikely So then you might ask well. What is the idea that everyone has worth before the law? Grounded in where does that idea come from it comes from the idea of natural rights that we have natural rights And then you might ask well where do the idea of natural rights come from well? And then you’re then you’re starting to move beyond the realm of rational philosophy because natural rights the idea of natural rights has been something Has been an idea that’s been emerging for thousands and thousands of years You know it’s it’s grounded in Christianity at least to in the in the map it’s grounded in Christianity to the degree that one of the things that distinguishes Christianity is the idea that there is a universal faith and that everyone whether they’re in that faith or not has intrinsic value and So natural rights are grounded in the idea of the intrinsic value of the soul and then that’s grounded in the idea that consciousness itself Participates in creation and say that’s an idea that’s embedded in Genesis and also in most creation stories So when you get rid of the religious underpinnings Which which which ground the entire system in a kind of dreamlike mythology when you get rid of that There’s no reason that What’s left over rationally can survive and and and you can see that if you look at what happened in the 20th century because there were at least two major challenges to the To the civilizations that evolved and they weren’t only Christian or Jewish Civilizations the same thing happened in China There was a replacement of these Evolved moral systems that emerged over a tremendous amount of time that no one rationally created Once people started to criticize them and to destroy the actions on which they were built and move them aside Then there was a gaping hole left and the hole was filled Well, it was filled most particularly either by Nazism which you know spread like mad Throughout central Europe or by communism which still possesses China so You know even though China came from a from a from a historical culture That was substantially different from say that of Western Europe once once Rationality emerged to the point where it could be used as a critical force Which happened in Europe that spread like mad and it it undermined The societies of China just like it undermined the societies of the world I mean Russia you can read you can read this if you read Tolstoy, for example in Tolstoy’s confessions Russia was really the last country that underwent the Transformations that were associated with the enlightenment. So when Tolstoy was a young person in the late 19th century He said he could literally remember when the announcement spread through his school that God was the first to say Who would have thought, when he went to school, that God was dead Now the your the western europeans had been working on that idea For a couple of hundred years, you know, with the dawn of the dawn of scientific thinking But the Russians were very backwards in some sense and they never they never They were never affected by the conflict between rationality and religion until it happened all at once It happened all at once at the end of the 19th century, and the consequence of that, it’s complicated, but the consequence of that was that the monarchy exploded, and then the consequence of that was that the Russians were left with nothing, and the consequence of that was the Bolshevik revolution. And then that was what started the entire Soviet nightmare. You see very frequently that when a society loses its grounding, say, in its historical truths, that it turns to something as an alternative. You see the same thing happened in Quebec, because Quebec didn’t undergo the modern transformation until the late 1950s. It was probably the last European society to go through the Enlightenment revolution, because the Catholic Church was an incredibly dominant force in Catholic Quebec until the late 1950s. The average family size during that time must have been in the neighbourhood of 10 children. And then all of a sudden, in the late 1950s, the Quebecers just lost their Catholicism. It was just gone. And now, for example, the Québécois have the lowest marriage rate in the Western world, and one of the lowest reproduction rates as well. And there was a Gallup poll that was conducted. I heard about this about, must be 10 years ago now. I don’t know if this information has ever been made public, but there was a Gallup poll that indicated that If you were a Catholic who had lost your faith, so you left the Church, you were 10 times more likely to be a Separatist. So you can see, the consequence of it is, is that if one belief system disappears, well, nihilism is one possibility. But another possibility is that you just adopt the next thing that’s close that gives you structure. And nationalism, of course, is one of those things. So Nietzsche diagnosed the disease, fundamentally. And then the psychoanalysts, like Jung in particular, they were trying to see… Nietzsche believed that if God died, because God died, people were going to have to take on the responsibility that was once God’s, so to speak, as a personal problem. So, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche said, God is dead and we have killed him, and we’ll never find enough one to kill him. But he also said, in order for people to withstand that catastrophe, they would have to become gods themselves, essentially. And, well, you can see how that might go wrong, if you think about people like Stalin and Hitler. But the psychoanalysts also, like the psychoanalysts, especially Jung, and then Heidegger for his part, took that idea seriously. Jung was trying to figure out, well, if we lose our historically conditioned values, we no longer believe in them. And if nihilism is the outcome on one hand and totalitarianism is the outcome on the other hand, what’s left? And the Jungian idea was, well, the revelation of the self is that the individual could, not as a rational mind, but the individual as a totality, it’s something that’s left. Rogers also believed that the individual as a totality would be capable of bringing forth genuine values as a consequence of self-exploration and honesty. Something like that. And that’s associated with the existential idea of individual responsibility. So, one of the upshots of the Jungian theory is that, to the degree you don’t bear the responsibility for your own actions, to the degree that you don’t bear the responsibility for your own actions, you don’t bear the responsibility for your own actions. To the degree that you avoid responsibility or shunt them off onto, say, totalitarian or ideological systems. So, when you avoid responsibility for your own thought, because if you’re the follower of an ideological system, you have avoided the responsibility of thinking for yourself. And the consequence of that was continual catastrophe, as those pathological, rational systems unfolded themselves. Solzhenitsyn wrote the Gulag Archipelago, published it in the early 1970s. And there were two things that made that book very striking. One was, the stories that he told were so unbelievably powerful that you couldn’t read them and not believe it was true. And that was even the case if you were a devoted Marxist. And at that time, in the universities, in many ways it hasn’t changed that much. The universities in the West were dominated by Marxists. And to some degree that was ethically inexcusable, because people had known since the 1950s, especially since George Orwell wrote, people had known since the 1950s that the Stalinist state was murderous beyond belief. So, Stalin, for example, killed 6 million Ukrainians in the 1930s. Because all of the farmers had been collectivized at that point. And what that meant was all the good farmers had been killed, and all the resentful farmers had been given the land, and then they collectivized the farms, and then Stalin took all the food to feed the cities, or to starve the Ukrainians, depending on how you look at it. And the edicts were so harsh that if you were a Ukrainian, and you had a family, and they were starving, and you went into a field after it had been harvested, and you picked out individual grains from the dirt to gather in a bowl to feed your family, if you got caught, then they would shoot you. Solzhenitsyn observed this, and he was very interested in how this system developed. And his conclusion, after decades of thinking, was that the reason the Russian system was able to maintain itself, fundamentally, was because individuals were willing to give up the responsibility of their own relationship to the truth, to the state, and constantly lie to themselves about everything. And that if the individuals that composed the state had refused to accept things that they knew full well to be untrue, that the state wouldn’t have been able to survive. And, you know, Solzhenitsyn’s case is very strong, because in some sense, he was the first person who told the truth about the Gulag Archipelago, which was this chain of prison camps that the Soviets had erected, on which their economy was essentially based. He was the first person who really told the truth about that, and he hit the foundations of Marxist theory so hard, that, well, partly it collapsed, and partly it went underground into movements like postmodernism. So his proposition, it’s a Dostoevskyan proposition, actually, that one person who stopped lying could overturn a tyranny. It’s a hard thing to believe. But there’s been multiple examples of that sort of thing in the 20th century. It happened with Gandhi, it happened with Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia, it happened with Nelson Mandela, it happened with Solzhenitsyn. So those are pretty powerful examples of the power of a single individual who refuses to accept the conventional lie. Dostoevsky was writing about the same time as Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky is a very interesting person. He was an orthodox Christian, although he’s a very intelligent man. And Dostoevsky and Nietzsche are twins in some sense, so what Nietzsche wrote in philosophy, Dostoevsky wrote in literature. And one of Dostoevsky’s primary statements was that if there’s no God, everything is permitted. So to take on Nietzsche’s discussion of nihilism, it’s like, well, if there’s no ultimate value of any sort, then why can’t you do exactly what you want? And that’s a theme he explores to great purpose in Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky’s conclusion was that the reason you can’t do anything you want is because you actually come equipped with an inherent set of values that are real. And that if you violate them to too great a degree, you’ll destroy your own structure, as well as damaging the society that’s around you. So Dostoevsky was a big believer, in some sense, like the Jungians and the Rogerians, that there are the locus of values within a human being, and that it’s an actual thing. You can’t disregard it without damage. Dostoevsky was also a very powerful critic of reason. It was reason, in some sense, that brought down the house of cards, so to speak, that constituted classical faiths. But the consequence of that rational destruction of values was the emergence of nihilism or totalitarianism. And the consequence of those two things is either the inability to live or the emergence of the murderous state. So Dostoevsky looked at that and thought, okay, I’m going to do this. Okay, well, perhaps our belief that reason itself is the proper guide to reality is wrong. And so this is one of the things he wrote in Notes from Underground when he was exploring this idea. Notes from Underground, by the way, it’s a very short book, and it’s very much worth reading. Dostoevsky wrote five books that are incalculably great. And what happened to Dostoevsky, I don’t remember if I told you this or not, but he was a student radical, and he was arrested by the Tsar’s men because of a riot or a protest that him and his compatriots had come up with. He was sort of a bit player in it, but they put him in prison when he was a young man. And then he was in prison for quite a while, and then one day they took him out into the courtyard and they shot him at dawn. They had the soldiers line up and put him by a post and shot him, but they used blanks. But he didn’t know that. And it scared him so bad he had epileptic seizures. And then he had epileptic seizures for the rest of his life. And the kind of epileptic seizures he had were associated with mystical experience. So Dostoevsky, before he got a seizure, would have this sense that he was experiencing the world in a more and more meaningful way until he was on the very dawn of sort of omniscient knowledge and then he’d have a seizure. But it wasn’t until he was shot with blanks and then put in this terrible prison for a long period of time and had epilepsy that he became a great novelist. It changed him in some way. His early writings are really, they’re not good. They’re sterile and dry. And his later writings, the five great novels in particular, they’re in a class of their own. So Dostoevsky, the first thing Dostoevsky tried to come to grips with was the fact he didn’t believe that life itself was rational. That’s an enlightenment proposition that the structure of reality is in and of itself rational. So it can be dealt with by rational means. And that’s been a very powerful theory because it’s enabled us to develop this scientific viewpoint of the technology that goes along with it. But rationality is not the only mode of human knowing. There’s all sorts of other modes of human knowing. And many of those are associated with emotion and motivation. They’re more biologically instantiated, say, and less computational. And rationality has a very difficult time even conceptualizing how those other modes of knowing might be real. And so what it tends to do is denigrate them as mere opponents to rationality. But the Dostoevsky perspective, and this is also something that Rogers followed up on, and Jung, was that life itself is so irrational, or experience itself is so irrational, given its suffering and its absurdity, that a merely rationally formulated representation of life is insufficient. It can’t manage the job. And what rationality will therefore do is cut away everything from life, cut away everything from its definition of reality that it can’t actually encapsulate. Dostoevsky said, In short, one may say anything about the history of the world, anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can’t say is that it’s rational. The very word sticks in one’s throat. And indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening. They’re continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity, who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbors simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet, we all know that these very people sooner or later have been false to themselves. That’s a precursor of Freudian ideas. Playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one. Now I ask you, what can be expected of man, since he is a being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing. Drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface. Give him economic prosperity, so that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species. And even then, out of shearing gratitude and spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes, and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly, that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself, as if that was so necessary, that men are still men, and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely, that soon one will be able to desire nothing except by the calendar. And that’s not all. Even if man really were nothing but a piano key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable. He would purposefully do something perverse, out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means, he will contrive destruction and chaos, and suffering of all sorts, only to gain his point. He will launch a curse upon the world. And, as only man can curse, it’s his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals. Maybe by his curse alone he will attain his object, and that is to convince himself that he’s a man, and not a piano key. And if you say that all of this too can be calculated and tabulated, and chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposefully go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point. I believe in it. I answer for it. For the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he’s a man, and not a piano key. It might be at the cost of his skin. It might be by cannibalism. And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don’t know? You will scream at me, that is if you condescend to do so, that no one is touching my free will. That all they’re concerned with is that my free will should, of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests and the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two makes four, twice two makes four without my will, as if free will meant that. That was written in the late 1800s as well, and Dostoevsky had already figured out by that point that the consequence of the new ideas swimming into Russia and undermining orthodox Christianity, which was, say, the natural culture in some sense of Russia, was going to be either nihilism or totalitarianism. And he examined the propositions of totalitarianism, and the propositions of totalitarianism were essentially utopian. The idea was, except, it’s like a cult, except this mode of being, except this interpretation of the world, and society will advance towards a point where, well, say in the case of communism, wealth is equally distributed and everyone is free. That’s a very, very powerful idea, obviously, because it attracted hundreds of millions of people, each according to his need from each according to his ability. Sounds fair, you get what you need to live, and you contribute what’s in it, what’s in you to contribute. And when it was laid out in the world, it was an absolute catastrophe. And Dostoevsky criticized this before it even happened. He said, look, human beings do not want utopia. We’re too insane for that. If you had comfort, sterile comfort, if you had everything you wanted just given to you, all you do is go crazy, just so that you wouldn’t have to be bored by all that perfection. You destroy it, so that the irrational element that’s inside of you, this Dionysian element, could leap out and live. And so whatever utopia is, it’s not the permanent solution to all of your problems. You don’t even want to live without problems. Kierkegaard, writing a little earlier, but along a similar track of ideas. He’s also criticizing the idea of utopia, believing, at least in part, that the meaning in life is to be found within the struggle that constitutes life, and not in the solution to that struggle, which maybe is equivalent to death and not to utopia. It is about four years ago that I got the notion of wanting to try my luck as an author. I remember it quite clearly. It was a Sunday. Yes, a Sunday afternoon. I was seated as usual outside at the cafe in the Fredericksburg garden. I’d been a student for half a score of years. Although never lazy, all my activity, nevertheless, was like a glittering inactivity, a kind of occupation for which I still have a great partiality and for which perhaps I even have a little genius. I read much, spent the remainder of the day idling and thinking, or thinking and idling, but that was all it came to. So I sat there and I smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought. Among other thoughts, I remember these. You are going on, I said to myself, to become an old man without being anything, and without really undertaking to do anything. On the other hand, wherever you look around you, in literature and in life, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious and much heralded men who are coming into prominence and are much talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by the telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing. And finally, the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier, yet more and more significant. And what are you doing? Here my soliloquy was interrupted because my cigarette was smoked out and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again and then suddenly this thought flashed into my mind. You must do something. But inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible for you to make anything easier than it has already become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder. This notion pleased me immensely. And at the same time it flattered me to think that I, like the rest of them, would be loved and esteemed by the whole community. For when all combine in every way to make everything easier, there remains only one possible danger, namely that the ease will become so great that it becomes altogether too great. Then there’s only one want left, although it is not yet a felt want, when people will want difficulty. Out of love for mankind and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere. Kierkegaard is often regarded as an existentialist. One of the ideas that runs its way through existentialism is the idea that to be human is to be a human being. And that existentialism is the idea that to be human is to simultaneously be saddled with an intrinsic responsibility, a moral responsibility. That you’re responsible not only to yourself, to your soul, say, but also to the people around you. And that that isn’t an arbitrary imposition that’s imposed upon you by rationality, or by your fellow man for that matter, but something that’s right at the heart of the reality of existence itself. Such that if you thwart or fall short of bearing that responsibility, you’ll pay a price in guilt and in shame, and in suffering. Binswanger and Boss, working off Heidegger’s lead, said that guilt and fear are debts to possibility. If you’re guilty about something, well, it’s because you’re not upholding your responsibility. Whereas for Freud, that was often a form of pathology. Excess guilt. And of course, excess guilt can become pathological. But Kierkegaard’s point is that guilt itself isn’t something to be cured. It’s an integral and necessary part of reality. Just like disgust and despair and fear and all the negative emotions. They alert you to your place in the world and guide you towards the unfolding of your spirit. Failure to shoulder your existential burden is what results in neurotic guilt and fear. Binswanger and Boss also believe that existential anxiety, and that’s the feeling of nothingness, is fear of loss of world. That the world that you inhabit, the conceptual world that you inhabit, can be destroyed at any moment. And that you’re aware of that at some level. It’s the same comment that Nietzsche made. And Nietzsche believed that this was something that modern people were particularly susceptible to, because our rationality is always capable of sawing off the branch that we’re sitting on. Because no matter what you’re doing, even if you’re engaged in it deeply, the critical part of your mind can always say, well, what makes you think that’s so worthwhile? And you know, an answer could be, well, it manifests itself as being worthwhile. And why should I pay attention to those rational doubts? But that’s not how we’re trained. We’re trained that rationality is the thing that encompasses everything, instead of being trained that rationality is something that’s encompassed by something else. And so if doubts come up that are rational, we immediately believe them because they’re rational. Instead of asking ourselves, well, if the rational doubt is undermining the meaning in my life, and making it difficult for me to proceed, maybe the thing to do is to question whether or not that doubt is valid. Now, it depends on what you regard as real, because if it’s the rational argument itself that’s real, then you can’t dispense with the doubts. But if you say, well, rationality is too limited in its apprehension to deal with the absurdity of life, there are other sorts of answers, like music, for example, or art, or the kind of engagement that you experience when you’re involved in something that you’re incredibly interested in. Those are forms of reality that you can regard those as forms of reality that transcend rationalism, instead of being something embedded inside rationalism that can be destroyed by doubt. And the problem with doubt is that it can undermine you completely. That’s nihilism, but even worse than that, it can lay you open to ideological possession. And that’s satanic in its catastrophe. I’ll talk to you a little bit now about the concentration camp. Concentration camps were established in England, Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia, and Yugoslavia. And in the Soviet Union, the estimates, these are estimates that were derived by Solzhenitsyn, were that 66 million people died in internal repression in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959. That’s a figure that’s ten times as great as the figures that are commonly used to describe the genocide rate in the Holocaust, which was more like six million. And Solzhenitsyn also estimated, but no one knows, that 100 million people died in China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when Mao decided that he was going to wipe out all of Chinese tradition and destroyed much of the ancient artifacts that characterized the Chinese culture. In a riotous catastrophe that lasted more than a decade. Solzhenitsyn says, the imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses, because they had no ideology. That’s what gives evildoing its long-sought justification. And that’s why the Chinese people, the Chinese people, because they had no ideology, ideology. That’s what gives evildoing its long-sought justification, and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That’s the social theory which helps to make his act seem good instead of bad in his own eyes and others. This was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills, by invoking Christianity. The conqueror of foreign lands by extolling the grandeur of their motherland. The colonizers by civilization. The Nazis by race. And the Jacobins early and late by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. Without evildoers, there would have been no archipelago. The archipelago, the Gulag archipelago, is Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor for the prison camps, like the prison camps that exist now in North Korea, in which millions of people are starving and dying. For the prison camps that littered the entire Soviet Union. Those cultures became so pathological that in East Germany, for example, before the wall fell down, and East Germany was arguably one of the more civilized parts of the Soviet state, one person out of three was a government informer. So if you have a family of five people, there’s a reasonable probability that two of them are going to tell a government agent what you say and think. And that that was also portrayed as the highest possible moral virtue, because it was much better for you to be an admirable citizen of the state than say a loyal daughter. And that’s what children were taught in school. That the family was a defunct unit, and that individual relationships were secondary, and that all that mattered was adherence to the dogma that constituted the central axioms of the state. This is Solzhenitsyn’s description of how communist ideological uniformity was enforced in the prison camps. An anonymous author is told how executions were carried out at ADAC, a camp on the Pechora River. They would take the opposition members with their things out of the camp compound on a prisoner transport at night, and outside the compound stood the small house of the third section. The condemned men were taken into a room one at a time, and there the camp guards sprang on them. Their mouths were stuffed with something soft, and their arms were bound with cords behind their backs. Then they were led out into the courtyard where harnessed carts were waiting. The bound prisoners were piled on the carts from five to seven at a time, and driven off to the Gorka, the camp cemetery. On arrival, they were tipped into big pits that had already been prepared and buried alive. Not out of brutality. No. It had been ascertained. That when dragging and lifting them, it was much easier to cope with living people than with corpses. The work went on for many nights at ADAC, and that is how the moral political unity of our party was achieved. If you have a rigid belief system, and that’s what an ideology is, but you have to be a little more open-minded, if you have a rigid belief system, and that’s what an ideology is, because its axioms are such that it encompasses all of reality, and then there are details left outside that don’t seem to fit into that reality, well then you ignore them, but what if they’re embodied? What if they’re people who are objecting to the way you think? Well, the equivalent to repressing evidence that runs contrary to your theory is the murder of people who object to what you say. And those two things are linked much tighter than you would think. You might think, well I would never do something like the communists did in the evangelization of my beliefs, but the truth of the matter is that in general people will do such things if they’re granted the opportunity and provided with the proper apparatus. This is Frankl from his accounts of the concentration camps under Nazi Germany. The most ghastly moment of the 24 hours of camp life was the awakening, when, at a still nocturnal hour, the three shrill blows of a whistle tore us pitilessly from our exhausted sleep and from the longings in our dreams. We then began the tussle with our wet shoes, into which we could scarcely force our feet, which were sore and swollen with edema. And then there were the usual moans and groans about petty trouble, such as the snapping of wires which replaced shoelaces. One morning I heard someone, whom I knew to be brave and dignified, cry like a child, because he finally had to go out to the snowy marching fields in his bare feet, as his shoes were too shrunken for him to wear. In those ghastly moments I found a little bit of comfort, a small piece of bread, which I drew out of my pocket and munched with absorbed delight. Solzhenitsyn. Many of the Gulag camps contained two classes of prisoners, rapists, murderers, and thieves, who were very well organized in Russia and the Soviet Union, and political prisoners. And because the Soviets believed in the Soviet Union, they were very well organized in the Soviet Union. Because the Soviets believed that the reason that people were thieves, murderers, and rapists was because of the appalling sociological conditions that they grew up into, they believed they were socially friendly elements who could still be redeemed. So they put them in charge of the camps. And so the political prisoners were at the bottom of the hierarchy. The prisoners ran the camps with minimal supervision. And the camps were often forced labor camps. And forced labor meant, do something difficult and pointless until you die. It didn’t mean, it meant only secondarily produce something of potential value to the state. You saw this with Nazi Germany too. The Nazis, when they started to lose the Second World War, they could have stopped their Holocaust machinations and used the people they had imprisoned to build implements to further the war effort, which they did to some degree, so they could have used them as slaves. So this would be the logic. Take the slaves, make the munitions, win the war. Then, after you’ve won the war, you can run around and mop everybody up. But that isn’t what the Nazis did. When they started to lose, instead of doing what you think would be rational, in the pursuit of what was hypothetically their goal, they amped up the killing and took resources away from the war itself. And so the conclusion that’s reasonable to draw from that is that the killing was the purpose of the war. All the rest of it was just window dressing. And exactly as Solzhenitsyn described in the earlier quotes that I told you, ideology was only there to allow the people who were fundamentally motivated towards genocide and destruction to pretend to themselves that they hadn’t become rotten to the absolute core. But when push came to shove and they had to show where their allegiances lie, they weren’t even valid followers of the Nazi party. Because they put the continued pursuit of death above their own survival, even as an ideology. And that’s how ideology degenerates. And part of the reason for that is that the narrower the box that you stuff yourself into, the weaker your character becomes. Because there’s nothing left of you. You’re just a shell that has demons in it. But you’re still the sort of thing that can suffer. And so if you cram everything you are into a box, a small tight box, and you get rid of everything that doesn’t fit, you get rid of everything in you that makes life bearable. And then life becomes unbearable. And then if life becomes unbearable, well then of course you’re motivated to do nothing but to take revenge on it. Because why wouldn’t you? If all you were doing was suffering stupidly and meaninglessly, how could you possibly show a positive face to yourself and to the rest of humanity? In cold lower than 60 degrees below zero, work days were written off. In other words, on such days the records showed that the workers had not gone out to work. They were often digging canals on the frozen Siberian prairie by hand. There was one canal, I think it was on the Volga River, but I can’t remember precisely. Stalin killed 300,000 people in a single winter, digging it by hand. And when it was done it was so shallow that no ships could use it. The records showed that the workers had not gone out to work, but they chased them out anyway. And whatever they squeezed out of them on those days was added to the other days, thereby raising the percentages. And the servile medical section wrote off those who froze to death on such cold days on some other basis. And the ones who were left who could no longer walk and were straining every sinew to crawl along on all fours on the way back to camp, the convoy simply shot so that they wouldn’t escape before they could come back to get them. This is from William Blake. Oh, Rose, thou art sick, the invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm. Hath found out thy bed of crimson joy, and his dark secret love does thy life destroy. This is Solzhenitsyn. Fire, fire. The branches crackle in the night wind of late autumn, blows the flame of the bonfire back and forth. The compound is dark. I’m alone at the bonfire, and I can bring it still some more carpenter’s shavings. This compound here is a privileged one. So privileged that it’s almost as if I were out in freedom. This is an island of paradise. This is the Marfino-Sharashka, a scientific institute staffed by engineers. Staffed with prisoners in its most privileged period. No one is overseeing me, calling me to a cell, chasing me away from the bonfire. And even then, it is chilly in the penetrating wind. But she, who has already been standing in the wind for hours, her arms straight down, her head drooping, weeping, then growing numb and still. And then again, she begs piteously, citizen chief, please forgive me. I won’t do it again. The wind carries her moan to me, just as if she were moaning next to my ear. The citizen chief at the gatehouse fires up his stove and does not answer. This was the gatehouse of the camp next door to us, from which workers came into our compound to lay water pipes and repair the old ramshackle seminary building. Across from me, beyond the artfully intertwined, many-stranded barbed wire barricade, and two steps away from the gate, I see a small, dark, dark, dark, barricade, and two steps away from the gatehouse, beneath a bright lantern, stood the punished girl, head hanging, the wind tugging at her grey work skirt, her feet growing numb from the cold, and a thin scarf over her head. It had been warm during the day when they had been digging a ditch on our territory. And another girl, slipping down into a ravine, had crawled her way to the Vladikino Highway and escaped. A guard had bungled, and Moscow city buses ran right along the highway. When they caught on, it was too late to catch her. They raised the alarm. A mean, dark major arrived and shouted that if they failed to catch the girl, the entire camp would be deprived of visits and parcels for a whole month because of her escape. And the women brigadiers went into a rage, and they were all shouting, one of them in particular, who kept viciously rolling her eyes. Oh, I hope they catch her, the bitch. I hope they take scissors and clip, clip, take off all her hair in front of the line-up. This wasn’t something she had thought up herself. This is the way they punished women in the Gulag. But the girl who was now standing outside the gatehouse in the cold had sighed and said instead, at least she can have a good time out in freedom for all of us. The jailer overheard what she said, and now she was being punished. Everyone else had been taken off to the camp, but she had been set outside there to stand at attention in front of the gatehouse. This had been at 6 p.m., and it was now 11 p.m. She tried to shift from one foot to another, but the guard struck out his head and shouted, Stand at attention, whore, or it will be worse for you. And now she was not moving, only weeping. Forgive me, Citizen Chief. Let me into the camp. I won’t do it anymore. But even in the camp, no one was about to say to her, All right, idiot, come on in. The reason they were keeping her out there so long was that the next day was Sunday, and she would not be needed for work. Such a straw-blonde, naive, uneducated slip of a girl. She had been imprisoned for some spool of thread. What a dangerous thought, you expressed there, little sister. They want to teach you a lesson for the rest of your life. Fire, fire. We fought the war. We looked into the bonfires to see what kind of victory it would be. The wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire. To that flame in you, girl, I promise, the whole wide world will read about you. From Milton. This is from Paradise Lost. Milton wrote Paradise Lost just before the rise of the nation states, and Milton also had the intuition that there was something wrong with rationality, and he identified rationality with the mythology of Satan. In the mythology of Satan, Satan was represented as the highest angel in God’s heavenly kingdom. So you can think about that as the highest psychological function, who had rebelled against God and was then cast into hell. There’s an idea that’s being expressed by Milton. He was one of the foremost poetic geniuses of the English language, Milton and Shakespeare. And what Milton was trying to understand was what is the nature of evil? And his representation gathered up the dreamlike theories of evil that had been collected around all of Western civilization for thousands of years. And his hypothesis was this. Evil is the force that believes that its knowledge is complete, and that it can do without the transcendent. And as soon as it makes that claim, it instantly exists in a place that’s indistinguishable from hell. And it could get out merely by admitting its error, and it will never do that. This is from Richard III, Shakespeare. Solzhenitsyn describes the reactions and actions of communist party members who were devoured by the system, because that often happened. The prison system, the gulag system, was made to be a place of The prison system, the gulag system, was very indiscriminating. You could land there for good reasons or bad, and the bad reasons were probably better, because the punishment was more severe if you were imprisoned for your innocence. And communist party members often got vacuumed up, and this was ontologically and existentially intolerable for them, because they committed their whole soul to the ideological dogma. And then its tyrannical aspect picked them up and destroyed them like they were worth nothing. To say that things were painful for them is to say almost nothing. They were incapable of assimilating such a blow, such a downfall, and from their own people too, from their own dear party. The typical arrest was, you’re at home with your family in your bed, and it’s three o’clock in the morning. And the doors kick down, and they take you out of your bed in whatever you happen to be wearing, and they tell you to say goodbye to your family and give you like 25 seconds to pack, and then you’re gone, and no one sees you again. They take you to the prison, they take off all your clothes, they shave your head, they have you pick out some random clothes from a pile of clothes, hopefully they don’t fit, and then you’re tried, you confess, if you will, and you’re off to the prison camp. To say that things were painful for them is to say almost nothing. They were incapable of assimilating such a blow, such a downfall, and from their own people too, from their own dear party, and from all appearances for nothing at all. After all, they had been guilty of nothing as far as the party was concerned, nothing at all. It was painful to them to such a degree that it was considered taboo among them, uncommredly, to ask, what were you imprisoned for? They were the only squeamish generation of prisoners. The rest of us, with our tongues hanging out, couldn’t wait to tell the story to every chance newcomer we met, and to the whole cell, as if it were an anecdote. Here’s the sort of people they were. Olga Sliosberg’s husband had already been arrested, and they had come to carry out a search and arrest her too. The search lasted four hours, and she spent those four hours sorting out the minutes of the congress of the bristle and brush industry, of which she had been the secretary until the previous day. The incomplete state of the minutes troubled her more than her children, who she was now leaving forever. Even the interrogator conducting the search could not resist telling her, come on now, say farewell to your children. Here’s the sort of people they were. A letter from her 15-year-old daughter came to Elizaveta Tsetkova in the Kazan prison for long-term prisoners. She said, mama, tell me, write to me, are you guilty or not? I hope you weren’t guilty, because then I won’t join the Komsomol, which was the young communist organization, and I won’t forgive them because of you. But if you’re guilty, I won’t write you anymore, and I will hate you. And the mother was stricken by remorse in her damp, grave-like cell with its dim little lamp. How could her daughter live without the Komsomol? How could she be permitted to hate Soviet power? Better that she should hate me. And so she wrote, I am guilty. Enter the Komsomol. How could it be anything but hard? It was more than the human heart could bear to fall beneath the beloved axe. And then to have to justify its wisdom. But that’s the price a man pays for entrusting his God-given soul to human dogma. Even today, any orthodox communist will affirm that Tsetkova acted correctly. Even today, they cannot be convinced that this is precisely, quote, the perversion of small forces that the mother perverted her daughter and harmed her soul. Here’s the sort of people they were. YT gave sincere testimony against her husband. Anything to aid the party. Oh, how one could pity them. If they at least had come to comprehend their former wretchedness, this whole chapter could have been written quite differently, if today at least they had forsaken their earlier views. But it happened the way Mary at Danielin had dreamed it would. If I leave here someday, I am going to live as if nothing had taken place. Loyalty? In our view, it’s just plain pigheadedness. Those devotees to the theories of development construed loyalty to that development to mean renunciation to any personal development whatsoever. As Nikolai Adamovich Vilanchuk said, after serving 17 years, we believed in the party, and we were not mistaken. Is this loyalty or pigheadedness? No, it was not for show and not out of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, that they argued in the cells in defense of all the government’s actions. They needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own rightness. Otherwise, insanity was not far off. This is from Paradise Lost. So, in this scene, Satan is cast into hell, and it’s because of his rebellion against the transcendent, his idea that he himself is sufficient. This is his statement to his crew. Farewell, happy fields, where joy forever dwells. Hail, horrors. Hail, infernal world, and thou, profundest hell, receive thy new possessor, one who brings a mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, or hell of heaven. What matters where, if I be still the same? And what I should be, all but less than he whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least we shall be free. The Almighty hath not built here for his envy, will not drive us hence. Here we may reign secure, and in my choice. To reign is worth ambition, though in vain. To reign is worth ambition, though in hell. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. The existentialists of the late 19th century attempted to diagnose the pathology of the human personality at a deeper level, I believe, than anyone else had ever attempted. And their fundamental conclusion was that the destruction by rationality of the evolved systems of meaning that people had previously lived within had undermined the psychological strength of each individual, divorced from their own history. That led them to gravitate towards either nihilism or as a counter position to gravitate towards totalitarianism. The whole 20th century played out the pendulum swing between nihilism and totalitarianism. And in the background, the existentialists and the psychodynamic theorists were putting forward a theory which was that if people lived up to their own possibility and held on to their own experience as if it were true, and did not substitute for that ideological and consensuality of the human personality, ideological and consensual beliefs, that it would be possible for each person to find a wellspring of meaning that would be a sufficient replacement for what had been lost historically without having to fall into the pitfalls of nihilism or totalitarianism. So you might say, well, nihilism, well, that’s one thing because mostly that affects you, although if you’re nihilistic, then everyone around you is going to be pulled down as well. But totalitarianism is a whole different issue because what we know now is that once things become ideologically totalitarian, the next step is mass murder. And the next step is mass murder in a manner that makes it appear that the purpose for the ideological rigidification to begin with was the opportunity to participate in mass murder. So you know how Hitler died. Hitler lost faith in the German people because they were losing the war. And so he concluded in the waning stages of World War II that Germany should just be destroyed in fire and everything else that he could possibly consume would go with him. And so he died in a bunker underneath Berlin. When it was in flames, he committed suicide. When Europe was in flames. And Hitler was a worshiper of the kind of fire that purifies. He used that mythology of cleansing fire to enter into a terrible pact with the entire nation that he followed and led. And Stalin didn’t just kill individuals that he pulled off the streets. He killed all the engineers and all the doctors because he believed they were wreckers. They killed all the good farmers. They killed six million Ukrainians. They moved whole nations of people into Siberia and let them die. And there’s every bit of evidence there is suggests that what Stalin was doing was practicing murderous genocide on an ever larger scale and hoping that it would culminate in a thermonuclear war. And we escaped that just by a thread. The existentialists make the claim, which I think is a remarkable and powerful claim, that the way out of those catastrophic situations is not through political action per se or it’s not going to be resolved by one party defeating another or one position defeating another. That’s a continuation of the same process that produces the problem. The existential and the psychodynamic answer to this problem is that it’s more a disease of the soul than a disease of the state. And that the way to address it is to ensure that you live in a manner that makes you neither nihilistic nor susceptible to ideological possession. Solzhenitsyn and other thinkers like the Marxists, and other thinkers like him, like Frankl, believed that society was a macrocosm of the individual. Not the other way around, not that the individual is a sub-element of society. Believed that the choice that each individual made was potentially so powerful in relationship to pathological behavior or honest and thoughtful behavior that a single individual properly developed could stand up against a tyranny and win. And it seems to me, and I thought about this for a very long time, that the lesson of the 20th century is that a single individual can stand up against a tyrant and win. And each of us are single individuals. And the danger of tyranny and the danger of nihilism are not past. And so as inheritors of the catastrophic legacy of the 20th century, and as inhabitants of the new millennium, part of your responsibility is to live your own life, and to live it honestly, and to pay attention to your own experience, and not take the easy way out that ideological systems offer you. They’re destined to transform themselves into rigid and murderous pathologies. And you offload your responsibility for thinking and acting to them. And then you have to ask yourself, well, what are they? Well, all the evidence suggests that they’re not the sort of thing that you want to have in your head. The grades are up. We’ll see you on Tuesday.