Existentialism Talk

so we've started to talk about existentialism from the perspective of the individual but it's necessary to also understand the individual in relationship to the whole and when you're speaking about existential personality theory it's even more important to place the individual in a broader context and the reason for that at least in part is because it's while it's for two reasons is it's that the initial existential theorists most particularly Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were very interested in the political consequences of inauthenticity now Nietzsche believed that it was the drive for truth that had been hyper developed in Europe at least from a technical perspective by Europeans submission to Catholicism for for thousands of years that eventually overthrew Christianity in them in its dogmatic form but he also believed that the consequences of that would be the weakening of the individual human being at least initially who was then more or less cast adrift but even more importantly that there would be dire political consequences and he was particularly concerned about the potential for collective collectivist thinking to exert a murderous hold over the modern world now interestingly at exactly the same time it's so remarkable how much Nietzsche's life in Dostoyevsky's life paralleled one another it's really as if they were two sides of the same person because Nietzsche was philosophizing more or less explicitly well das Neves he was exploring exactly the same themes in his writing and there's multiple forms of this parallelism so for example when Nietzsche was the ideas that Nietzsche was working out and beyond good and evil were the same ideas that possessed in many ways that possessed Dostoyevsky's character Raskolnikov in crime and punishment which is a pretty nice parallel title to beyond good and evil and then even more interestingly Dostoevsky wrote a novel called the possessed or The Devil's which I think is the least accessible of his great novels it takes about you know Dostoyevsky's great novels are very long like great Russian novels tend to be and they have a very large cast of characters and all of the characters have three names plus they have nicknames and so it's quite difficult to keep track of them and it takes quite a long time I think for a modern reader especially one who's not familiar with with with Russia or Russian literature to to have it all come together in a coherent narrative hole and that's most pronounced I think in his book the devil's but the devil's is an unbelievably interesting book because it describes individual psychopathology and in some ways the same way that Dostoevsky does in notes from underground but it links it to this susceptibility to a certain kind of political extremism and utopianism in a very direct way and so it notes for underground for example the main character is very psychologically weak partly because he doesn't believe in anything and so because he doesn't believe in anything even if he's offended even if he finds something unacceptable personally he finds it very difficult to stand up in a in opposition to it or even to stand up for himself because he's so full of doubt that he questions everything he he does and Dostoyevsky presents the main character in notes from underground as someone who's fragmented to the point of radical uncertainty now his characters in the devil's have the same underlying problem which is in some sense the demolition of the integrity of their personalities by the collapse of their formal individual and collective belief systems but instead of becoming riven by uncertainty uncertainty and doubt they become possessed by certainty and hence the name the Devils or the possessed I mentioned to you at one point that Jung famously claimed that people didn't have ideas that ideas had people which i think is one of the loveliest lines I've ever come across it's it's it's so brilliant but Dostoyevsky's novel the possessed is about how ideas have people and his main character in that novel if I recollect properly is named stavrogin and stavrogin is the kind of nihilistic thinker who turns to totalitarianism and basically what happens in the Devils is that he turns to precisely the ideas that also manifested themselves in radical Marxism and then later because the possessed was written quite a bit before the death of the czar in the Russian Revolution you know it's several decades before that but Dostoevsky felt that these ideas were in the air in some sense as an alternative to classical European thought including not only classical or religious thought but also classical enlightenment thought now Tolstoy wrote a book called confessions which I would very much recommend reading it's a very short book and in confessions what happens to Tolstoy is he talks about his experience in Russia when the news of the death of God in some sense swept across Russia in a in us a sudden storm the Russians had been feudal for a very long period of time and they were backwards in many ways compared to the rest of Europe and they had stuck in their medieval cultural form far longer than most European states but when that collapsed it collapsed with amazing sudden with with amazing instant 1080 and Tolstoy writes in the confessions about remembering when the idea first dawned on him and many other people simultaneously that the entire edifice of Orthodox Christianity was no longer tenable and then what happens with Tolstoy in confession is that he describes his absolute collapse as a integrated psychological being and his descent into the underworld roughly speaking Tolstoy at the height of his success and he was the most successful author in the world at one point certainly and perhaps you know people still argue that maybe he was the greatest author who ever lived although I think Dostoyevsky deserves that title but I'm more of a psychologist and a sociologist and Tolstoy was a sociologist Tolstoy was unwilling to wander around his estates with either a gun or with a rope nearby because he was afraid that he would either shoot or hang himself and it's because he despite his fame and his great estates and his political his political work he was very interested in the emancipation of the serfs for example he concluded in some sense that life was an evil joke it was as if life was an evil joke being played on mankind by a cruel creator and that everything was ultimately meaningless but finitely terrible and and and generating nothing but pointless suffering and Tolstoy said very very clearly that a a man with conviction who came to that conclusion could only continue to live by deluding himself and he thought in such a thought he couldn't think himself out of the proper that his unwillingness to kill himself was a form of cowardice once he had come to that realization and so confession is about that and you know he tries to turn to the kind of religion that characterized the Russian peasantry which would be you know in some sense an ignorant immersion in beliefs that intellect have superseded but of course that wasn't available to him and at the end of confession something happens to Tolstoy to redeem him in a sense but all it is is a dream and he dreams of this he dreams that he's suspended over a great abyss by a rope and as far down as he can look there's nothing but empty space but then he turns to look up and he can see the same rope above him stretching up into the sky as far as it can reach and that's basically how the book ends and you know the inference is something like Tolstoy dream revealed to him the proposition that although there were abysmal depths beneath mankind so to speak from a psychological perspective that we were also supported by something infinite but it's not articulated like the whole book just ends with the dream so well so Dostoevsky lays out the underground political movements that were characteristic of late the late nineteen or the late 1800s in Russia and he describes the emergence of the type of person who ends up after the Russian Revolution after the first world war becoming committed and involved in the collectivization process in Russia and it's virtually impossible to overstate how terrible the collectivization process was right from its onset you know you'll still hear apologists for Marxism and communism talk about the fact that the Soviet Union was captured by a cult of personality under Stalin and that that's why the ethical presuppositions of Marxism transformed into political our became so corrupted but I think that's absolute nonsense and I think it's nonsense of the most dangerous and reprehensible type and I think that for two reasons the first reason was Stalin was unbelievably murderous thug he pretty much killed everyone he knew including almost all of the they called them what were they I don't remember the term there were old revolutionaries all of the Bolsheviks who ran the revolution who didn't die during the revolution or of natural causes afterwards they were all killed by Stalin he probably killed his wife he killed pretty much everybody he knew I mean he was and he was a like an underground operative for Lenin during the revolution itself where he learned to be committed from an ideological perspective he'd come from quite an intensely religious background committed from an ideological perspective but then basically asked acting as a guerrilla assassin during the revolution itself and then later he rose to power it he certainly used Lenin's political machinations as machinations as a as a template for his later activity but Lenin was no when it came to extraordinarily brutal activity motivated by utopian dreams now what seemed to happen in some sense is that you can imagine and we're looking at the political structure the political movements of whole Nations we're going down to the bottom to look at it from a psychological perspective instead of thinking it of it from an economic perspective or a power perspective in some sense it's a it's a Jungian analysis of the rise of political movements in in Europe and across the world with an existential spin you can imagine that what classical Christianity had set up for people was not only a belief in in a shared moral reality that that everyone was super to be participating in but also some meaning for for some meaning for each individual's life to some degree no matter how much they were suffering and then the promise of a kind of perfection after death and of course people like Freud and people like Marx considered that an illusion designed either to protect the population from fear of death so that would be Freud's argument or Marx's argument would be well that that was a conspiracy in some sense promoted by the political and religious elite to keep the people who are being oppressed in their place well of course there's some truth to both of those but there's a difference between some truth and that truth and any extraordinarily complex phenomena has multiple causal elements and those are two important ones because of course anxiety about death and power are two very important psychological phenomena and they play their role in determining any important collective or individual activity but you can't forget about the rest of the the rest of the story now so this collapses and that leaves a void and that void is a void in people's souls so to speak it makes them nihilistic for example because they don't have any they can't see any ultimate meaning in what they're doing but it also simultaneously makes them more susceptible to utopian mass movements of a rational type and of course that's exactly what happened with regards to the Marxists and with regards to the fascist so what Hitler offered his followers in collaboration with them because it wasn't so much that Hitler told people what he wanted them to think as it was that Hitler listened to what the crowds wanted and then told it back to them in a collaboration that extended across his entire rule because Hitler was a great populist and he was very very good at receiving messages from the audience but Hitler basically offered his population the dream of racial superiority and world domination you know as well as many many other things that went along with that so and then of course Marx offered his followers the idea that the oppressed could shed their chains and that everyone could unite workers that intellectuals alike in particular it was them it was more the the owning the owning class the bourgeois as they're still called by some people who were the the evil oppressors and the union of worker and intellectual would eventually Shepherd in a golden age where everyone offered to society as much as they could offer and took from society as much as they needed right and that's the famous phrase from each according to his ability to each according to his need which sounds wonderful you can I can understand why that would be an attractive slogan but if you start to think about how that would be administered in practice and you really start to think it through you realize very very rapidly that it's a rep as a recipe for absolute disaster partly because well how do you tell the difference between your need in your need if your mother needs cancer surgery and your genius brother needs to do go do his PhD whose need Trump's well and that's just a trivial problem because all of you have those competing needs and how anybody is ever going to adjudicate between the value of needs is beyond cognitive comprehension it just can't be done not without brutality especially because you know there's limited resources and then the next question is well okay you're supposed to contribute according to your ability how much ability do you have you know what that meant in practice that was that people were frequently worked to death because the ability isn't a definable entity you know and unless you have some sort of complicated and functional system to negotiate to allow people to negotiate amongst themselves peaceably about what they're going to offer and what they're going to take you have to turn it over to something like a centralized Authority and you know that's just well you don't need much imagination to understand that that would be an absolute catastrophe and it was an absolute catastrophe now one of the things that's really interesting about Dostoyevsky's book The Devil's is that it's segways almost perfectly into Alexander Solzhenitsyn scription of the emergence of the Russian prisoners the Soviet prison camps after the Revolution so basically what happened and this is what Solzhenitsyn revealed in the 1970s was that because the communist system was so financially untenable the principles just didn't work for all sorts of reasons the the system ended up running basically on a system of work camps and so much of what the Russians produced the Soviets produced which wasn't very much by the way although they got industrialized very very rapidly was produced by people who were basically enslaved and that's the only way the system could continue to function now Solzhenitsyn estimated that between nineteen and 1919 which is basically the end of the first world war and 1959 which is basically when the Stalinist era came to an end so that's only 40 years that 60 million people were killed in the Soviet Union as a consequence of internal repression I didn't count the Second World War now people debate these figures and Solzhenitsyn is surprisingly to me a controversial figure because I don't see where the controversy is people complain about his numbers claiming that death count of 60 million people over that period of time is mathematically untenable but reason more reasonable estimates if you want to put it that way put it up to 20 or 30 million and though the truth of the matter is that no one knows and that even makes it worse I mean we do know for example that that's the attempts at collectivization in the 1920s led to the creation of a agricultural catastrophe made worse by Stalin's peculiar economic policies that killed six million people in the in the Ukraine in the 1930s now how many of you knew that how many of you know about the Ukrainian famine how many didn't know okay one thing you might want to ask yourself is why the hell don't you know you know you know lots of things about the mass deaths in the in the 20th century but my experience has been that students in the West know almost nothing about what happened as a consequence of the imposition of radical left-wing dictatorships and it's not trivial thirty million in the Soviet Union let's say six million in Cambodia under Paul Pott Paul Pott was trained at the Sorbonne and he took what he learned at the Sorbonne from his radical left-wing professors and put it into practice in Cambodia emptied out the cities because he had learned that under standard Marxist Dogma city people who are mostly bourgeois were parasites on the workers he emptied the cities and killed six million people and then in China during Mao's Cultural Revolution while no one really knows Seoul Jeunesse Solzhenitsyn's estimates were a hundred million but you can take half that if you want these are massive massive numbers of people and part of the reason that I think it's reprehensible to pin the absolute catastrophes of the Soviet state on the Stalinist cult of personality was that it didn't only happen in the Soviet Union it happened with with catastrophic results in all sorts of places where these economic policies were implemented and I believe that the reason that Western students roughly speaking don't know about these things is that the the the intelligentsia of the West Europe and North America we're going to say for the time being were so heavily influenced by radical left-wing ideas from the 1920s well to the present day that these facts have never been made as have never been disseminated in his thorough a manner as is only appropriate so the French intellectuals for example from whom post-modernism derived people like jean-paul Sartre and Foucault and a very large group of French intellectuals who were involved in the student radical left student movements in the late 1960s and who ended up barricading the streets of Paris in 1968 which is when the student movement sort of peaked and then and then fell away um they never apologized in any real sense for their the fact of being enamored of well at least in part the policies of Stalin and also the policies of Mao and there's no excuse for that so now the problem is of course is that left-wing radical left-wing political and economic ideas are intellectually quite coherent like they make sense once you accept a certain set of axioms like from each according to his ability to each according to his need you accept that axiom you accept the idea that the the capital class the capitalist class which is roughly anyone who owns anything only owns what they own because they've stolen it from someone else so that there's labor is productive but nothing else is productive everything else is a secondary derivation of labor and you know that's an absolutely moronic economic theory because obviously there's work that has value there's work that has no value the fact that it's difficult has almost no relationship to whether or not it has value unfortunately you know it's not like the political system or the economic system is a perfect mirror of effort it's not like that at all so you might say that well I would say really what happened in the 20th century is once people stopped worshipping and externalize deity they started to worship if they were intelligent they started to worship rational utopian ideas and if they weren't as intelligent they turned to the state like identification with the state like the Nazis for example identification with the state as an alternative source of collective power and both of those were in comprehensively devastating and we're not done with it yet you know I mean one of the things that happened in the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn one of who's I have you read one of his the chapters of The Gulag Archipelago which is an amazing piece of writing one of the things that Solzhenitsyn Solzhenitsyn points out is there was this extensive prison camp system in the Soviet Union that he called the gulag archipelago it was this chain of camps all across the Soviet Union and if you were thrown in there because you were a political prisoner you were the worst kind of prisoner and you could be thrown in there as a political prisoner pretty much for expressing any opinion whatsoever about the state which is we're going to get back to that as we tie this together with existentialism now the Communists we regarded the murderers and the rapists and the thieves as socially friendly elements because it was a it was part of Marxist doctrine that the only reason that you would become a murderer or a thief or a rapist was because you were part of an oppressed class and your poverty was what generated your crime so in some sense you couldn't be held personally responsible for it an upshot of that was that the thieves and the rapists and the murderers ran the prisons well Russia right now is a mafia state there's evidence for example that Putin is the richest man in the world and he has almost singular power over this over the affairs of the Soviet Union the former Soviet Union the Russians the Soviets killed anybody that had any capacity for independent thought and they raised the thugs to to the highest positions of authority and you guys are going to be dealing with that for the rest of your life so and if you think that that's changed you're wrong it hasn't changed at all Russia's just transformed from a totalitarian communist state into a mafia state and that's a big problem so we're not done with this yet and one of the things that Solzhenitsyn he was this is why I use him as a psychological thinker you know people generally consider Viktor Frankl that the primary existential psychologist or psychiatrist now Viktor Frankl came through the Nazi prison camps and he developed logotherapy as a consequence of that and logotherapy what part of the principles of logotherapy were laid forth in his book man's search for meaning and one of Frankel's propositions was essentially that because life is suffering and can be unbearable suffering that it's necessary for people to have a countervailing meaning to buttress themselves against the tragedy of existence and Frankel basically claimed and this is an existential claim that if you that you could find that meaning and collective belief but that there were terrible dangers associated with that and so your moral obligation was to find that meaning within the confines of your own authentic individual life and you can see that sort of idea also arising in the thought of Carl Rogers for example and it's also there in Jung because of course Jung believed that there was this path he called individuation which was the flowering and manifestation of the healthy and integrated the deep healthy and integrated fundamental human personality of course Piaget believed something similar although more collective because for Piaget the hammering of your psyche into something resembling an integrated state also had to be done in active concert with all of the people around you you know because you were organizing yourself into a coherent internal game where all your little sub personalities could find their place well simultaneously doing that with other people over long spans of time but you can see this the theme there's a theme that emerges in all of those thinkers and one of the themes is this that there are healthy pathways to psychological development and the existentialists in particular although this was also the case with young young worked as a secret agent for the American government and provided the President of the United States with psychological reports on Hitler's state of mind I wasn't even discovered until about three years ago so all of these thinkers were concerned about collective pathology and at the same time concerned about individual development and I don't think you can really separate those things and the reason that I use Solzhenitsyn is because he basically takes the same tack as Viktor Frankl especially in the gulag archipelago but it's a much more thoroughly developed body of thought like I'm an admirer of Frankel I think man's search for meaning is an amazing book but it's a good book whereas the Gulag Archipelago is a devastatingly profound book they're not in the same they're not in the same league you know it's it's like Solzhenitsyn is - Viktor Frankl what Dostoevsky is - virtually any other author you know there's this I don't know what it is about the damn Russians maybe their suffering has done something to them over the hundreds of years that it's been in place but they can produce people of unbelievable profundity as well as you know crooks who are crooked and and had murderous beyond comprehension so you know Solzhenitsyn was very interested in trying to understand what happened to the Soviet Union was how that it could how could it transform itself into a state that powered the majority or a vast minority of its citizens and often the best of the citizenry I mean it was very common in the Soviet Union and this is through the entire Soviet bloc I mean you were required to be an informer roughly speaking you were certainly taught to be an informer at school and you know the Soviets made much of children who were patriotic enough to turn in their own parents you know they were held up as models of behavior and it was very frequently the case that if you denounce the neighbor that was a really good waste way for your family to get their apartment and of course apartments were an incredibly scarce supply and far too many people generally lived in the same locale and so if you were a three-generation family living in a one-bedroom apartment one of the most effective ways to get your children a new apartment was to denounce the neighbor down the hallway and as a reward you'd be given the apartment well you can imagine who would take advantage of that kind of offer now what happened in the 1920s during the collectivization so here it here's the idea how the serfs had been emancipated in the late 1800s and they were basically feudal inhabitants of parcels of land who were more or less owned by the nobility it wasn't exactly slavery but because the serfs had certain sets of rights but it was it was culture to slavery then to anything else that you would conceptualize from a modern perspective the serfs were emancipated in the late 1800s actually at about the same time that slavery was abolished in the United States approximately the same period of time anyways and so there was and of course Russia had a very rich aristocracy and it had a monarchy and so the idea that and then it went through the First World War and was viciously demolished during the first world war the idea that there was an underclass of impoverished people and an over class of aristocratic parasites was a compelling idea and it was a compelling idea in many places other than Russia especially at the turn of the century and that was partly because the Industrial Revolution was brutal and farm life was very difficult and there was a massive gap between rich and poor and you know that was that was an attractive political explanation and it had partial truth because of course people are exploited and often poor people are poor because they're exploited but there's lots of other reasons to be poor and rich people are sometimes rich because they exploit but of course there's lots of other reasons to be rich as well so these ideas were put into practice by the Bolshevik revolutionaries and one of the most one of the most comprehensive manifestations of that idea took place in the 1920s when the Soviets underwent a process that they called dekulakization now so imagine this so in the in the late 1800s the serfs were emancipated what that meant was that some people started to own their own land you know they weren't Nobles that owned it owned the states they were more like what we would consider sort of middle-class farmers so they owned some land they owned some animals they might own a half-decent house in the town and they might have done enough or been fortunate enough to have collected enough money and enough property and enough stability so that they could hire one or two people to help them with their crops so they were by no means rich but they were they were the successful farming class of the Soviet Union okay now the Communists put forward the idea that there was no way that you could have a brick house in town and owned more cows than your neighbor and have some productive land put aside and worst of all hire someone to work for you unless you had essentially stolen that from your neighbors so then the Communists would send out activists from the cities and they would go to these towns and start spreading this doctrine okay now you've got to think this through now who is going to be most responsive to that doctrine well it's going to be the most jealous useless jealous and resentful people in town it's going to be the guys that are hanging around in the local bar drinking themselves half to death every day who feel that they've been totally screwed over by life that are that hate the people who have come up with a modicum of prosperity and then someone comes along and says hey as far as our doctrine goes those people you hate they're nothing better than thieves it's your moral and patriotic duty to rise up and take everything they have and that's exactly what happened so during the dekulakization process there basically be mobs of jealous and resentful thugs who would go into the houses of these moderately prosperous people who were actually the only people in the soviet union who knew how to farm and they took everything everything they go into their houses and stripped them bare and take all the animals and and then what the Communists did with the kulaks was they allowed them to take they were going to resettle them up mostly in Siberia well there was no settlements in Siberia so basically what they meant what that meant was hastily built rail lines would take them in in the middle of the winter with their families and dump them on the frozen Prairie where well all the children would die and everybody more or less would freeze to death and so you know the Communists said while you could take two months worth of food with you but of course they didn't make any provisions for having that two months of food and after you had gone through the process of decolonisation you could bloody well be sure that you didn't have two months of food left that you could take when you were suddenly bundled onto the trains and driven to the middle of nowhere well you know after a number of years of that which which also involved the forced collectivization of all the remaining people the distribution of the land in principle to everyone and then collective farming while the entire agricultural economy fell apart and that particularly the case in the Ukraine which is a very very fertile part of the world and which was the breadbasket of Russia roughly speaking well everybody starved the Communists had to put up posters telling people that eating their children was wrong they would kill people if they went out in the fields after the harvest so they'd go out with her big harvesting machines vacuum up all the grain ship it to the cities because the cities were also starving and leave nothing for the people behind and then if you went out there in the field like if you were a mother and your child was starving to death and you went out there in the field and you picked up individual kernels of grains so that you gather them in a cup and bring them home to feed their fat your family that was an executable crime because you were suppose you're stealing from the state if you were going to go out there and bloody well pick up the wretched little kernels that are left you know calf crushed into the ground that it was your moral obligation to turn those over to the state because I suppose that was part of your ability and the need somewhere else was greater well Solzhenitsyn was very interested in how the hell this sort of thing could even happen you know because and he wasn't interested in it precisely from a political perspective I mean I would say he started being interested in it from a political perspective analyzing the actions of people like Lenin and Stalin he wrote a very interesting book on Lenin which was one of the first documents that made Lenin out to be the same sort of person that Stalin was even though I think now the historical evidence for that is crystal clear but it soldier Nansen ended up more by doing a psychological analysis and that's because as he considered what had happened to his country he couldn't escape the proposition that the reason it had become so corrupt was because all of the individuals within it had allowed themselves to become corrupt and so one if you're wondering for example how you know your political system has become corrupt or or let's let's put it differently how you know that any system that you happen to be embedded in has become corrupt one way of of assessing that judging that is to determine for yourself whether or not you're allowed to say what you think you know I mean you can genuinely think something without it being right obviously but if you genuinely think something that's your truth and you know in the marketplace of free ideas everyone is allowed to express their truth that doesn't mean everyone's right it doesn't mean that you have any right to have people listen to you it doesn't grant you any access to power but at least you get to say what you think and if that's withheld from you or you're punished for it you can bloody well be certain that the system has started to take a vicious turn towards oppression and repression and that the outcome of that's going to be bad even if your thoughts are reprehensible you should be allowed to put them forward not least because the rest of the society needs to know where the dangerous wingnuts are so that you can so that the ideas can be brought up you know out in the open and disqualified you know so freedom of speech encompasses the freedom to say the most outrageous things just so everybody knows what you're thinking because if you can't say it that doesn't mean you're not thinking it it's just going to go underground and fester there like a Freudian repressed thought so freedom of speech has nothing to do with protecting the kind of speech that is necessarily pro-social it's exactly the opposite of that is you want everybody to say what they're thinking because then you know what they're thinking and it's and well and it's also often the case that people can't come to the truth unless they're allowed to express their untruth and have that you know criticized in the in public forums so Solzhenitsyn's conclusion was that there was no way that the terrors of the Soviet state could have got the foothold that they got unless individual people were willing to falsify that nature of their own experience and in the Gulag Archipelago he basically did he basically describes a society it's 2,700 pages long this book and it's little tiny type it's a very very comprehensive examination he basically shows you story after story tells you story after story of how people falsified their experience in the service of the state and so the story is basically something like this he said this is what happens when you give your god-given soul over to human Dogma so the basic idea is well you're left in it you're left in a sphere that it is is as the absence of a well-defined meaning so that's a consequence of the collapse of the previous belief systems and because you're torn apart by that in some sense you don't know where to turn in one direction is of course nihilistic and the other direction perhaps is totalitarian now another direction might be that you try to figure things out on your own and still live a life that's truthful and and and that has integrity but we're going to leave that alone for a moment because it's it's difficult to even conceptualize that might exist if you've already swallowed the presupposition that all the values have fallen apart you turn to totalitarianism okay well it tells you what to think it tells you how to act it tells you how your society should be structured but it does some things that are even more subtle and subtly destructive than that because what it also does is positive future utopia which is an organization of the state where everyone has everything they want permanently now Dostoyevsky when he wrote Snow --tz-- from underground he basically said well this was way before the Communist revolution he said he was talking about these sorts of utopian egalitarian communitarians he said they've got human beings completely wrong right right from the bottom up because if you took the typical person he says you if you gave them everything they possibly wanted to eat so that all they had to ever do was eat delicious cakes and they didn't have any other responsibilities than What did he say indulging in the continuation of the human species and so that if they were so happy that if you put them under water nothing but people's of bliss would float up to the surface the first thing that people who were put in that situation would do would be to wander around smashing things just so that something unexpected and interesting would happen you know it's a brilliant critique of utopianism because it's exactly right he said he basically Dostoyevsky said people are so crazy that they'd rather be subjected to inconvenient and unexpected occurrences than just to lay there all saw per if acquit bliss and so that there was something wrong with the whole utopia notion right from the get-go because that's just not what people are like they'd rather have interesting trouble than non interesting perfection you know and I think that's an incredibly powerful idea but anyways this you can just think about that in relationship to your own character I mean how often do you do something that's trouble just to see what happens I mean it's exactly what people are like you know even chimpanzees juvenile chimps if they see an old male sleeping underneath the tree they'll go and poke him with a stick just to see what happens you know and it's like well if you can't see human Humanity in that sort of behavior there's something wrong with you so but the utopians offered this vision of the future which was basically paradise on earth but they also proposed that it was something that could be attained through certain types of you know direct political action which usually meant well fix your neighbor up or even worse meant steal what he has because he shouldn't have it anyways and the problem with the utopian vision essentially was that if my theory is associated with the future utopia in a logical way so I can make a case to you that if you do this and we do that and they do this and we organising things this way then will usher in a period of prosperity that's almost heavenly in its in its promise the problem with that is it means we can do any bloody thing bloody thing we want right now because the end product is so valuable that it justifies it and so what happens is that the utopian vision turns into a rationale for the most destructive forms of behavior in the here and now and then when someone is called to task for it's like what the hell do you think you're doing you know they'll say something like well you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs you know and that's all well and good if you happen to be making the omelet but it's not so damn good if you happen to be one of the eggs and there were plenty of eggs broken on the way to you know the Soviet vision of success well and you know there's good evidence Stalin by the time the mid-1950s came around there's pretty decent evidence from the KGB archives that he was preparing to launch a thermonuclear war against Europe I mean he'd already killed god only knows how many million people by that point a few more hundred million weren't really going to weigh that heavily on his conscience the last book I read on Stalin which was published which was called Stalin it was written by a guy who had access to the KGB and communist party archives he claimed that Khrushchev and three other people killed Stalin in the late 1950s to stop him from invading Europe so I mean you know in the battle between the Communists utopians and the West we came this close to wiping everything out several times so now what happened in some sense was this is that this theory was laid out to cover the world so the Marxist theory was presented itself as a scientific theory an inevitable theory of history and the theory of history was that the warfare between the oppressed and the oppressor was the primary fact of life and that that needed to transform itself into a egalitarian utopia and that there were certain states that political states that mankind would have to go through to reach that end ok so that was basically the theory and part of the theory was that in order to get to that point then resources had to be distributed equally to all which sounds fine in principle but then again the devil is always in the details and how to distribute resources equally is by no means self-evident you know part of the reason that the English came up with the idea of the free market this is Smith fundamentally is because Smith figured out that trying to figure out what things were worth is so complicated that you can't actually calculate it so then we would say well what's your coat worth I'd say well would you give me your coat for five dollars $2 thousand dollars okay so so but so the point being is that you know there's no way of establishing the worth of things because the worth of one thing is it's worth in relationship to all other things of worth like it's a continual interaction between all things of worth and the only way you can make that calculation is by letting people individual people make micro choices and that the value of things is established as a consequence of a hundred billion micro choices we call that in the modern world we call something about some that's something like distributed cognition you know it's like you're outsourcing a price decision to the marketplace what's this thing worth well the answer is whatever people will trade for it and it's not a cop-out it's it's an illustration indication of the fact that you can't come up with a computation that will allow you to determine what something is worth so I mean I can give you an example of that from my own life trying to figure out what something is worth I developed some software to help people hire employees and we did the mathematical calculations and figured out that if people use this particular software instead of going through a interview process which doesn't work very well that it would basically if they used if they gave it to ten people to select one employee that it would save them about thirty five percent of the salary of the hired person per year so if you hired someone who was being paid a hundred thousand dollars then the return on investment would be thirty five thousand dollars a year and we could sell this for say well we didn't know what how much do you charge for the tests then so you might say well if it $35,000 a year you're going to have this person around for four years because that's how long the average person stays in their job that's a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and so then you only have to use ten tests and so maybe we could take half of the first year so that would be $17,000 so it'd be seventeen hundred and fifty dollars a test and you'd get like a thirty what is it you get a eight times return on your investment well you should be just jumping at that well it doesn't work like that at all we ended up having to sell it for about twenty dollars a test and we could hardly sell it to anyone because well for reasons that are far too complex to go into but my point is is that it's impossible to make a pricing decision it's really really difficult and to think that you could make a conscious and pre-programmed pricing decision for every single commodity is completely insane and that's what they tried to do in the Soviet Union and I read at one point that the central purse up right pricing committee had to make ten thousand pricing decisions a day well you can't even come up with the price of one you put things on Kijiji you know it's like well what's it worth well you look at what everyone else is paying for it roughly speaking and then it depends on how quickly you want to sell it what kind of shape it's in and you know it's complicated and you have a pricing guideline you just have to look the damn thing up it's still hard to figure out what the price is but imagine you have no comparative information at all what's a hypodermic needle worth well I guess it depends on whether you need it to inject the penicillin that's going to save your life or if you're just putting it in your cupboard to store it but it's a complicated decision alright so anyways this utopian scheme was set up and we're acting on the proposition that people used it at least in part as a replacement for their alternative for their old belief systems which i think is a perfectly reasonable proposition but we're also going to take a psychoanalytic approach and we're going to say well it also allowed people to manifest bad faith because if your worth can be determined by how good a cog you are in the fascist or communist machinery it pretty much alleviates you of any responsibility that you have to have for your own life so that for every positive reason that you might join a utopian movement there's a negative reason which as well you can benefit from its exploitive nature and you don't have to take any responsibility well Solzhenitsyn and Frankel both talked about that a lot as did Nietzsche but Frankel and Solzhenitsyn are more interesting because they actually happen to live through the imposition of systems like that and could see them from the inside Soulja Vincent's first observation was Marxist economics didn't work well that was a big problem because it was supposed to work and not only was it supposed to work it was supposed to work perfectly and what that basically meant was that if it didn't work you only had one of two options you could either abandon the damn system and start to complain about the fact that you had to line up for bread for four hours a day which was perfectly typical daily activity for people for example in Poland and in Russia before the wall came down everything cost nothing but there wasn't anything to buy so it wasn't very much of a bargain and instead of paying for your bread with money you just paid for it with time you stayed in line for two hours or three hours or five hours and when you got to the front of the line at the department store you took whatever the hell was there because you didn't even know what it was that you were going to be buying when you joined the line up and so it wasn't like it was free you just paid for it with your time so Solzhenitsyn noted that what happened as the system continued to manifest its counterproductive properties was that either people had the choice of saying oh this isn't working worth a damn there must be something rotten in Denmark or pretending that everything was all right and lying about everything and that's what they did they lied about everything and so we've got to you got the situation up to the point where in East Germany before the wall came down one out of every three people was a government informer that meant if you had a family of six people two of them were telling the government what you were talking about at dinner and that was their duty and so what that meant in these societies was no one ever said anything that they meant ever and if they did the probability that the KGB was going to kick down their door at 4:00 in the morning and take them off to the Central Prison before dumping them in some damn camp where they'd never see anybody they ever do for the rest of their life was extraordinarily high so you watched everything you said and everything you thought around your wife around your brother around your sister around your children and the whole system ground onward in a mire of absolute deception and lie and Solzhenitsyn's point as well and this is one of Frankel's main points is that if people had had if people had decided to stop lying the system would have ground to a halt but that isn't what people did they just kept lying now he noticed when he was in the prison camps because he was in them for a long time he did encounter people inside the camps like Frankel did who were absolutely unwilling to falsify their experience so for example one of the things that had to happen if you were arrested by the KGB and sentenced to a prison camp was that it was necessary for you to sign a confession and that's so peculiar you think huh they're going to arrest you arbitrarily and put you on trial for trumped-up nonsense why couldn't they just Forge your damn signature it's like why did they care if you confessed and the answer to that was well it was part of the way the system kept itself validated because the people who were torturing you could justify the torture if you agreed that you were actually at fault and so rather than face the fact that they were just doing something corrupt innocent people they'd extract a confession out of you so that they could convince themselves that you deserved exactly what you got now Solzhenitsyn said at one time that one person who stopped lying to bring down a tyranny now that's a pretty radical statement but you know when he wrote the Gulag Archipelago I mean he memorized that damn book when he was in one of the prison camps because they didn't give him pencil or paper and even if they did they wouldn't been able to carry the damn manuscript around so he basically memorized it 2700 pages you know written at the volume of a very loud screen when he got out of the prison camps he had two copies of it typed up one by one typist and one by another they didn't know each other the KGB broke into the one typists home and stole the manuscript and she killed herself then the guellen you can understand why you know what she thought this was a tremendously valuable piece of work and she thought it was the only copy and they destroyed it well he couldn't even tell her that there was another one because they would have got it too well then it was exported to the West in unpublished form and published in English to begin with and it was an absolute bombshell like and it was published in 1974 was at that point anyone who had any moral integrity whatsoever and who was also literate read that and said oh okay game over all those propositions they're wrong beyond belief and that part of what we thought might be possible is done well you know that happened to some degree it communism lost a tremendous amount of its intellectual credibility and that was part of the reason that it fell over in 1989 but you know it's not like everybody has shaken their no it's not as if everyone's faith and that sort of thing is being shaken you know there's this massive stream of Marxist utopianism that's still running through post-modernism and that's that's you know made its way to Western universities all over the world so despite all of this despite these tens of millions of deaths and this total moral corruption and no one even knows about it and I don't understand that it's completely it's completely unacceptable it's the biggest lesson of the 20th century you know and we hear a lot about the Holocaust and no wonder it was a truly terrible thing but there's all these other events of the 20th century that we're absolutely catastrophic and they're not part of general knowledge and you have to ask yourself why because if we can't learn from that if we can't learn from all those tens of millions of people who were tortured to death and and and and ruined in political prisons like you got to ask yourself can we actually learn any thing I'm going to read you some of the things that Solzhenitsyn wrote he doesn't say the name of this person it's in it's in dashes someone he meant he met either in a camp or afterwards he told our executions were carried out at a dock a camp on the Peshawar 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 these were people who were opposing the communist ideology the condemned men were taken into a room one at a time and there the camp guard 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 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 calculated than when dragging and lifting them it was much easier and more efficient to cope with living people than with corpses the work went on for many nights at a dock and that is how the moral political unity of our party was achieved this is from Franco this is the concentration camps in Nazi Germany these those were the size of cities by the way I mean when you think of camp I don't know what image it brings up in your mind but you know you might think of an enclosure the size of a city block or something like that but that's not right these places were the size of cities because there was tens of thousands of people in them 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 tourists pitilessly from her 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 sore and swollen with edema and there were the usual moans and groans about petty troubles 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 to the snowy marching grounds in his bare feet as his shoes were too shrunken for him to wear in these ghastly moments I found a little bit of comfort a small piece of bread which I drilled my pocket and munched with absorbed delight this is Solzhenitsyn so in these camps people were set out to work and it would depend on where they were what they were working on but maybe it was the digging of a canal or maybe they were setting up a factory or or they were doing something that required the generally required intense physical effort and each of these camps had a they had a goal right that was established from above it's like a 5-year plan your camp is to produce this much in this period of time and then if you didn't produce that much in that period of time then the people who ran the camp were going to be held accountable which generally meant that they were going to be put in some camp themselves and so there was every reason to drive people to their death in order to fulfill the work norms and when that didn't happen they just falsified the records anyways because what the hell was their choice and Solzhenitsyn talks about how they got around the rules in cold lower than sixty degrees below zero work days were written off in other words on such days the records showed that the workers have not gone out to work well so then you can tell a bit about the benevolence of the Soviet state if it was 55 below well then you could go out to work but if it was 60 below you got to stay home while that isn't even how it worked in other words on 60-below days the record showed that the workers had not gone to work but they chased them out anyways 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 we're straining every sinew to crawl along an 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 so Stalin had a group of people hundreds of thousands of people dig a canal in the 1930s and unfortunately I can't remember the name of the canal but some three hundred thousand people froze to death digging it with spades and shovels in the middle of the Russian winter and when it was finished it was so shallow that none of the ships that were planned to go up and down it could use it but it got finished even though it was the middle of the winter this is from William Blake Oh rose thou art sick the invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm have found out thy bed of crimson joy and his dark secret love does thy life destroy this is another story from Solzhenitsyn about a woman's camp he's standing in another camp watching this occur because the women of course were put in a camp separate from the men fire fire the branches crackle and 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 shavings the compound that I'm in is a privileged one so privileged that it is almost as if I were out in freedom this is an island of paradise this is the Murphy no shurochka which was a scientific Institute 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 gate how fires up his stove and does not answer this was the gatehouse of the camp next 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 gatehouse beneath a bright lantern stood the punished girl head hanging the wind tugging at her gray work skirt her feet growing numb from the cold and the 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 slipped down into a ravine crawled her way to the Vladek Ino Highway and escaped the guard had bungled and Moscow city buses ran right along the highway when they caught on it was too late to catch her so 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 I hope they take scissors and cut clip all take off all her hair in front of the lineup this wasn't something she had thought up for 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 and 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 gate house this had been at 6:00 p.m. and now it was 11 p.m. she tried to shift from one foot to another but the guard stuck out his head and shouted stand at attention horror or else 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 alright idiot come on in the reason they were keeping her out there anyway for so long was that the next day was Sunday and she wouldn't be needed for work such a straw a blonde naive uneducated slip of a girl she'd 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 and 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 and you girl I promise the whole world will read about you this is from Milton Paradise Lost for Wentz but from the author of all ill could spring so deep a malice to confound the race of mankind in one root and earth with hell to mingle and involve done all despite the Great Creator what are the political implications of existential psychology if you lie you corrupt the system if you will I enough the system becomes so corrupt that it turns on you and becomes murderous so the price of freedom as far as the existentialists are concerned and this is buttress by the historical knowledge that they garnered during the 20th century was that you have a moral obligation you have a moral obligation to speak the truth to maintain the integrity of the state as well as fostering your own psychological integration we'll see you on Tuesday

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 54,624

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Id: 2fUY046brGM

Length: 71min 6sec (4266 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 28 2016