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March 11, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:40:49

2017 Personality 13: Existentialism via Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag

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	Music Music Music Music Music So I want to tell you about a book today.
	The book is called The Gulag Archipelago.
	You ready?
	The book is called The Gulag Archipelago, and it's by a Russian author, a Soviet author named Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
	Who was in the Gulag Archipelago concentration camp system for a very long time.
	He had a very hard life.
	He was on the Russian front when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in the early stages of World War II.
	Now, Hitler and Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact.
	And Hitler invaded the Soviet Union anyway.
	And from what I've been able to understand, the Soviets had prepared an invasion force for Europe at that point, but were not concerned with having to defend their territory.
	And so they were caught completely unawares by Hitler's move.
	And the conditions on the Russian front were absolutely dreadful.
	And Solzhenitsyn was a soldier on the Russian front.
	And he wrote some...
	letters to one of his friends which were intercepted complaining about the lack of preparation and using bitter dark humor to describe the situation and the consequences of that was that he was thrown into a work camp.
	The Soviet system relied on work camps and so those were large labor camps Of people who were essentially enslaved, many of whom were worked to death, often froze to death, working in conditions that were so dreadful that they're virtually unimaginable.
	Solzhenitsyn spent a very large number of years in these camps, sometimes in a more privileged camp, because he was an educated man, and sometimes in worse camps.
	He also developed cancer.
	Later.
	And wrote a book about that called Cancer Ward, which is a brilliant book.
	So he had a very hard life.
	There's just no way around that.
	To be on the front and then to be in a concentration camp and then to have cancer.
	That's pretty rough.
	Now he wrote the Gulag Archipelago.
	He wrote a book called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich first.
	That was published in the early 1960s.
	When there was a brief thaw, Stalin was pretty much out of the picture by the end of the 1950s.
	There's some indication that he was murdered by Khrushchev and Khrushchev became Premier of the Soviet Union after Stalin and there's some indication perhaps that Stalin was either murdered by Khrushchev and a set of his cronies or when he was very ill just before he died was not helped at least by It wasn't provided with any medical attention because of the intervention of Khrushchev and his cronies.
	Now, there's some indication as well at that point that Stalin, who was absolutely barbaric in every possible way you could imagine, was planning to start a third world war.
	And he was certainly capable of doing such things because he had already imprisoned or killed tens of millions of people.
	Just after Stalin died, there was a bit of a thaw in the Soviet Union with regards to internal repression.
	In the early 1960s Solzhenitsyn published a book called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was a story about one day in the life, his life really, inside one of these so-called gulag archipelago camps.
	Now he called it the gulag archipelago because an archipelago is a chain of islands.
	And so Solzhenitsyn likened the work camp system in the Soviet Union, which is made up of isolated camps distributed across the entire state, he likened that to a series of islands, hence the metaphor.
	And one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich was one of the first publications released in the Soviet Union that dared make public What had happened inside these camps, at least initially.
	Now, that thought didn't last very long, but that book had a tremendous effect.
	It's a short book.
	It's worth reading.
	After that, he wrote a number of other books, which are also...
	He's a great literary figure in the same category, I would say, as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, which is like really saying something.
	Those two are perhaps the greatest literary figures who ever lived, with the possible exception of Shakespeare.
	He wrote this book called The Gulag Archipelago, which is published in three volumes, each of which is about 700 pages long.
	The first one details the origin of the oppressive Soviet system, at least in part under Lenin, and then its full-fledged implementation under Stalin, and the deaths of, well, Solzhenitsyn estimated the deaths in internal repression in the Soviet Union at something approximating 60 million between 1919 and 1959.
	Now, that doesn't count the death toll in the Second World War, by the way.
	Now, people have disputed those figures, but they're certainly in the tens of millions, and the low end bounds are probably 20 million, and the high end bounds are nearer what Solzhenitsyn estimated.
	He also estimated that the same kind of internal repression in Maoist China cost 100 million lives, and so you can imagine that the genuine historical figures...
	Again, are subject to dispute, but somewhere between 50 and 100 million people.
	And one of the things that's really surprising to me, and that I think is absolutely reprehensible, absolutely reprehensible, is the fact that this is not widespread knowledge among students in the West, any of this.
	And it's because your education, your historical education, if you started to describe it as appalling, you would barely scratch the surface.
	These were the most important events of the 20th century, and they're barely covered at all in standard historical Curriculum.
	You know of something, I would presume, about World War II and about the terrible situation in Nazi Germany and the death of six million gypsies and Jews and homosexuals in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
	But my experience with students has been that none of them know anything about what happened as a consequence of the repression of the radical left in the 20th century.
	And I believe the reason for that is that the communist System had extensive networks of admirers in the West, especially among intellectuals, and still in fact does, which is also equally reprehensible.
	And I believe that one of the consequences of that is that this element of history has been under, what would you say, under-examined.
	And certainly very little attention has been brought to it in the public school curricula, and there's absolutely no excuse for that.
	It was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century.
	And that's really saying something, because the 20th century was about as bad as it gets.
	And the fact that these deaths on massive scale occurred, and the fact that we don't know that deep inside our bones is a testament to the absolute rot of the education system.
	So now, you might think this is a strange thing to discuss in a personality course, but I have my reasons for doing it.
	The fundamental reason is that Solzhenitsyn, you might regard as an existentialist.
	Now, he says many of the same things that Viktor Frankl says.
	Viktor Frankl wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning, which I would highly recommend.
	And it's a description of the corruption that he saw leading into the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp systems, especially within the concentration camps itself, because Frankl was very interested in What sort of psychological catastrophe had to befall a given individual before that person was capable of acting as an agent,
	say, of the Nazis in the concentration camp system, and he concentrated particularly on these people that were known as trustees within the concentration camp system, who were generally Jewish individuals who were aiding the Nazis in their death work inside the camps.
	Now, what Frankel did Because he was also existentially oriented, was attempt to draw a parallel between the individual psychology and the mass pathologies of the state.
	And so the reason that I believe that this is important in a personality class is because it's necessary to analyze the relationship between the psychological integrity of the individuals with this...
	Within a society, and the propensity of that society to engage in, say, acts of mass atrocity, or to go completely off the rails and then to engage in acts of mass atrocity.
	And so, it was Frankl's contention, and also Solzhenitsyn's contention, and I would say also the contention of Vaclav Havel, who eventually, who was an author and playwright in Czechoslovakia, and eventually became president, that the fundamental linkage between the pathology and the state The pathology of the state and the individual was the individual's propensity to deceive him or herself and to fail to act in an authentic manner,
	in a genuine and authentic manner, and to become, as a consequence, either nihilistic, let's say, or because of the incremental weakening of character that's part and parcel of Of adopting an inauthentic mode of being, or to turn to ideological and totalitarian solutions as an alternative to living appropriately and with responsibility as an individual.
	So Solzhenitsyn in particular laid at the feet of the Soviet citizenry the burden of the absolute catastrophes that characterized that system because of each individual's Propensity or proclivity within the state to lie and deceive constantly about what they thought and what they said.
	And to be afraid to speak, and to be afraid to think, and to be afraid to criticize.
	And it was no wonder, because criticism, of course, at least became an offense that was punishable by death.
	But these things start much more slowly than that.
	And they start with people abandoning their own identities and adopting a pathological group identity Well, for any number of reasons, but one of them certainly is their desire to shrink from individual responsibility and their desire for ready-made ideological solutions.
	And so what I'm going to do today is I'm going to read you a little bit about the Gulag Archipelago, and then I'm going to show you a sequence of videos about a recent event that I think does a very good job of illustrating how this sort of thing works, and then I'm going to read you some of the Some of what I've culled from the Gulag Archipelago, so that you get a sense of what the writing is like.
	So Solzhenitsyn basically, he committed a huge part of the Gulag Archipelago to memory, which is really something, given that it's 2,100 pages long, and printed in like seven-point font.
	And the book is written at an unbelievable level of emotional intensity.
	It's...
	I remember there was a study once about how rats respond to cats, free living rats in their burrows, if they're exposed to a cat, or even to cat odour, will run back to their burrow.
	And stick their nose out and scream for 48 hours, right?
	Which is about the equivalent of you screaming for three months.
	Because rats only live about two years.
	And while that rat is screaming, all the other rats stay in their burrow and don't go anywhere.
	And so they scream ultrasonically, so you have to record it and then slow it down in order to hear it.
	But they're not very happy about that, about cats.
	And they actually...
	Don't need to be exposed to cats to learn how to be afraid of their odor.
	They're naturally afraid of it.
	Anyways, Solzhenitsyn's book, The Gulag Archipelago, is like a 2100-page screen.
	It's very, very intense.
	It's a very difficult thing to read.
	But it's absolutely crucial reading.
	It's actually now part of the curriculum in Russia, in high school, which also says something about Russian high schools compared to, say, North American high schools.
	Because I doubt if the typical North American high school student reads 2100 pages of anything during their entire education in high school, and certainly not something like the Gulag Archipelago.
	So I'm going to read you a little bit of background about the story, first of all.
	This is a nice summary.
	I've swiped it from Wikipedia.
	The Gulag Archipelago is a book by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
	He won a Nobel Prize for the book, by the way, and richly deserved it, about the Soviet forced labor camp system.
	The three-volume book is a narrative relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author's own experiences in a Gulag labor camp, written between 1958 and 1968.
	It was published in the West in 1973.
	And thereafter circulated in samizdat or underground publication form in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the Russian literary journal Novy Mir in 1989 in which a third of the work was published over three issues.
	So the samizdat or the underground press was basically photocopies or sometimes photostats Of banned works that people would compile and then hand from person to person.
	Of course, the punishment for being caught with something like that was extraordinarily severe, but the Samozdat was a, I suppose it was a precursor to the internet.
	That's one way of thinking about it, a slow precursor to the internet.
	Gulag, or G-U-L-A-G, or Gulag is an acronym for a Russian term.
	Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps, the bureaucratic name of the governing board of the Soviet labour camp system, and by metonymy, the camp system itself.
	The word archipelago compares the system of labour camps spread across the Soviet Union with a vast chain of islands known only to those who were fated to visit them.
	Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of the Russian Federation, the Gulag Archipelago has been officially published and included in the high school program in Russia as mandatory reading.
	Structurally, the text comprises seven sections divided in most printed volumes into three, parts one to two, three and four, and five to seven.
	At one level, The Gulag Archipelago traces the history of the system of forced labor camps that existed in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956, starting with Lenin's original decrees shortly after the October Revolution, establishing the legal and practical framework for a series of camps where political prisoners and ordinary criminals would be sentenced to forced labor.
	One of the things that's quite interesting about the Gulag camps, and this is something that's very relevant to understanding of modern Russia, is that, so, ordinary criminals were put into the camps, and so were political prisoners.
	But the ordinary criminals, and so those would be rapists and murderers, let's say, as well as thieves who were engaged in theft as an occupation, those were regarded by the Soviets as socially friendly elements.
	And the reason for that was that they assumed that the reason that these people had turned to crime was because of the oppressive nature of the previous czarist slash capitalist system.
	And that the only reason that these criminals existed was because they had been oppressed.
	They were oppressed victims of that system.
	And so one of the convenient consequences of that absolutely insane doctrine was that the Soviets put the ordinary criminals in charge of the camps.
	and these were very very seriously bad people and so you can imagine the way that they treated the political prisoners who were regarded as socially hostile elements sometimes because of their own hypothetically traitorous acts but more often merely as a consequence of their racial or ethnic identity or the fact that they were related by birth to say people who had been successful under the previous system so who had any association with nobility or any association with what We're known as the Kulaks,
	who were the only successful class of former peasants in the Soviet Union because they were regarded as privileged.
	You may have heard that word more recently.
	They were regarded as privileged and therefore as enemies of the state.
	And it didn't matter if it was your father or your grandfather or your great-grandfather who happened to be privileged, but the mere fact that you were a member of that group was sufficient reason to put you into a camp.
	And we're talking hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of people who underwent that fate.
	And so the idea in the Soviet Union was just because you were the member of a class, even as a consequence of your familial association, you were immediately sufficiently guilty to be put into a camp and punished.
	And the terms for the camps were often 10 years, 15 years long.
	And if you were very fortunate, you got to have two or three of those.
	So, the Soviets really implemented and perfected the idea of class and ethnicity-based guilt.
	And it's a very bad road to walk down, and it's something that we're very much engaged in at the moment, because there's discussion everywhere in North America now about the idea of, well, race-predicated guilt, for example, and ethnic-predicated guilt.
	And it's a very bad idea to classify an entire group of people as guilty of anything based on their group membership.
	So, these sorts of things are things we haven't yet learned, and certainly should have.
	Now, the other thing that was very interesting about the Soviet, especially about the Gulag Archipelago, you see, it was released in the West in about 1973 or thereabouts.
	Now, the student movement of the 1960s was very much influenced by Marxist and Communist doctrine, and that was especially the case in France, Where the most reprehensible intellectuals of the 20th century have emerged, emerged, including all the damned postmodernists who've occupied the universities now, as far as I can tell.
	And what happened essentially in France was that the Marxist slash communist students were attempting to foment revolution, but what happened, and that peaked in about 1968, And what happened was, at least in part, as a consequence of Solzhenitsyn's revelations,
	the idea that the Soviet model, or the Maoist model, for example, could be used as an example of the working people's utopia, was completely, and catastrophically, and at least in principle, finally undermined.
	Now, there had been, see, because the Western leftist intellectuals, all the...
	Right from 1919 forward, turned a blind eye to what was happening in the Soviet Union.
	Now and then they were invited there, even people who were very well regarded in the West were often invited, and who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union, were often invited there for a visit, and the Soviets would do the same thing the North Koreans do now when they invite foreigners to visit, which is that they would Set up fake places for them to visit called Potemkin villages where everyone was thriving and doing well.
	The Nazis did the same thing with the concentration camps to begin with, especially the ones they established for children.
	And they would invite dim-witted leftist Western intellectuals to come to the Soviet Union and see the wonderful paradise that had been set up for everyone, which was a complete...
	An utter facade and sham, and then they would go back to the West and report on how the utopia was progressing, precisely according to the Marxist doctrines.
	And we knew from the 1930s forward, because Malcolm Muggeridge did this to begin with, who investigated what was going on in the Soviet Union, I think for the Manchester Guardian, and he started reporting in the late 1910s and then the early 1920s, if I remember correctly, it was approximately in that period, maybe a bit later, He recorded what was happening when the Soviets attempted to collectivize the peasant farmers.
	And so what they did was take all these people who were previously serfs, right?
	Only a couple of decades previously, which was not much better than being a slave.
	You were basically property.
	And that was happening until about 1880 or thereabouts.
	The serfs were emancipated.
	Many of them ended up holding their own land, right?
	So the land was distributed from the nobles to the peasantry.
	That was something that Tolstoy was, Leo Tolstoy was involved in.
	And by the time the Soviet Revolution came around, which would be at the latter part of the 1910s after the First World War, the peasant class had actually established Farms of course varying productivity some of the peasant farmers were very very good at being farmers and produced a huge proportion of Russia's and the Ukraine's food because one of the things we'll talk about this later as the class progress is one of the things that you'll find if you look at creative production in any
	domain, it doesn't matter artistic domain, food production Novels written, novels sold, money generated, number of companies generated, number of goals scored in hockey, etc.
	Or number of paintings painted, number of compositions written, anything like that where the fundamental underlying measure is human productivity, what you find is that a very tiny percentage of people produce almost all the output.
	It's called a Pareto distribution, P-A-R-E-T-O, and it was studied in detail in scientific productivity by someone named DeSola Price.
	It's a square root law, so here's the law, fundamentally.
	If you look at the number of people who are doing, who are in a given domain, who are producing in a given domain, the square root of the people produce half the product.
	So that means if you have 10 employees, 3 of them do half the work.
	But if you have 10,000 employees, 100 of them do half the work.
	Right.
	It's a very, very vicious statistic.
	And you won't learn about that in psychology for reasons I have no idea about because you learn about the normal distribution and not the Pareto distribution.
	But Pareto distributions govern, for example, the distribution of money, which is why 1% of the...
	People in the general population have the overwhelming amount of money, and one-tenth of that one percent has almost all of that, right?
	So I think it's like the richest hundred people in the world have as much money as the bottom two and a half billion.
	And you think, well, that's a terrible thing, and perhaps it is, but what you have to understand is that that law governs the distribution of creative production across all creative domains.
	Right?
	It's something like a natural law.
	And we'll talk about that more, but imagine what happens when you play Monopoly.
	You've all played Monopoly.
	What happens when you play Monopoly?
	One person ends up with all the money.
	Alright?
	Then you play another game of Monopoly.
	What happens?
	One person ends up with all the money.
	It's actually the inevitable consequence of multiple trades that are conducted randomly.
	So if you take a thousand people and you get them to play a trading game, you each give them a hundred dollars, say, or ten dollars, and they have to trade with another person by flipping a coin, I win the coin toss, you give me a dollar, you win, I give you a dollar.
	If we all play that long enough, one person will end up with all the money and everyone else will end up with zero.
	So it's a deeply built feature of systems of creative production and no one really knows what to do about it because of course the danger is that all the resources get funneled to a tiny minority of people at the top and a huge section of the population stacks up at zero.
	But to blame that on the oppressive nature of a given system is to radically underestimate the complexity of the problem.
	No one actually knows how to effectively shovel resources from the minority that controls almost everything to the majority that has almost nothing in any consistent way, because as you shovel money down, it tends to move right back up, and it's a big problem.
	Anyways, the reason I'm telling you about that is because After the peasants were granted their land and started to become farmers, a tiny minority of them became extremely successful, and those people produced almost all of the food for Russia and Ukraine.
	So what happened in the 1920s when bloody Lenin came along and collectivized the farms was that they defined the kulaks, who were these tiny minority of successful farmers who maybe had a brick house and were able to hire a couple of people and had some land and some livestock and were very productive people.
	They defined them as socially unfriendly elements and they sent groups of intellectuals out into the towns to collectivize the farms and so the idea was that while you would pool your land and everyone would farm it collectively and the land was taken away, of course, from the tiny minority of people who were actually productive and had actually managed to own much of the land.
	So you have to imagine how that would occur.
	Okay, so it's in the 1920s.
	It's after World War I. Russia's in pretty bad shape.
	The villages are full of brutalized men who have post-traumatic stress disorder and lots of people who are not doing well at all.
	And the bloody intellectuals come into the town and they say, you know those successful farmers up the street that you've always been pretty jealous about in your useless manner?
	Well, they're actually pigs and demons who are stealing from you.
	So why don't you come out?
	We'll form a nice little mob and we'll take everything they've got.
	And that's exactly what happened.
	And all those people were killed or raped or set off to Siberia in the middle of the bloody winter where there wasn't even anything for them to...
	anywhere for them to live or anything for them to eat.
	So they all died.
	And then the consequence of that was a few years later, six million people starved to death in the Ukraine.
	And Malcolm Muggeridge had been reporting on that since the 1930s.
	And so that was the...
	That was the first wind, really, that the West got of exactly what was happening in the Soviet Union.
	But even at that point, the bloody left-wing intellectuals in North America were so damn clueless, and in Europe, that they never paid much attention to it, with the exception of a certain number of people like George Orwell, who wrote 1984 and Animal Farm, which is, of course, a discussion.
	The main pig in Animal Farm is Stalin, of course, and it's a story, an allegory about the Russian Revolution.
	Whose basic motif is, we're all equal, but of course some...
	All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
	And that's the motif of animal farms.
	So there had been warnings all the way through, right from the beginning of the Russian Revolution, to the West about exactly what was going on.
	But because communist and Marxist ideology is very good at addling the weak minds of idiot intellectuals, there was a huge section of the population who was fomenting, I suppose, against...
	The standard, what would you call it, political, psychological, and social order, who were absolutely committed to, you know, the ethic that's encased in statements like, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, which sounds perfectly wonderful if you think about it for about 15 seconds, but if you think about it for six months, becomes unbelievably murderous in its reach and intent.
	And so, anyways, the French, for whatever reason, seem to be particularly opaque to reason.
	I'll give you an example.
	So, the doctrine of Pol Pot in Cambodia that also killed about six million people.
	So what they did in Cambodia once the revolution occurred was, Decide that everyone in the city were parasites on the countryside because the countryside full of farmers was where the primary production was taking place and they regarded the city dwellers as parasites on that fundamental production.
	So they basically emptied out the cities and sent all the people in the cities out to work in the country as forced labor and six million people died there and the chief architect of that Bloody Project got his PhD from the Sorbonne and said exactly what he was going to do when he went back to Cambodia.
	Was cheered along by the French intellectuals who thought that that was just a fine idea.
	So that's all background for why I don't think any of you guys really know much about 20th century history.
	So anyways, what happened?
	In the 1970s when Solzhenitsyn published The Gulag Archipelago was that it was so brilliant, the book, and so overwhelming in its emotional and intellectual and historical power that it became impossible for anyone to continue to claim that Marxism slash Communism had any intellectual or ethical integrity whatsoever.
	It was done.
	It was done.
	And that's part of the reason why He won the Nobel Prize.
	And part of the reason, by the way, why the Soviet Union collapsed, because once word got out about exactly what was actually going on, there was no way of making a coherent argument in favor of, say, exporting the workers' revolution around the world.
	It was like the consequence of that was well documented by Solzhenitsyn.
	You see, the Western intellectuals tried to make excuses for what had happened in the Soviet Union by blaming it on Stalin's Cult of personality, perversion of the original accurate Marxist doctrine.
	So they basically said, well, Lenin, had Lenin lived, because he died quite young and was replaced by Stalin, had Lenin lived, the promised utopia would have been delivered.
	But Solzhenitsyn, being an absolute genius, documented the relationship, number one, between The axioms of Marxist and Communist thought and the laws that were generated primarily by Lenin and the construction of these camps and the dekulikization and all the mass murders, he documented the causal relationship between them and laid them clearly at the feet not of Stalin but of Lenin.
	And so that was also a major blow because it undermined the remaining argument of the left-wing, radical left-wing apologists in the West for the viability of Marxist slash communist doctrines.
	And you still hear people today, many people, when they're faced with the...
	You know, if they're Marxist in their orientation and they're faced with the data pertaining to what happened in the Soviet Union, they'll say something like, well, that wasn't real Marxism.
	But one of the things that you might answer to that is, well, fine, except that in every bloody country in the world where that doctrine was implemented, Regardless of the wide cultural differences between the cultures, say, the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and so forth, exactly the same thing happened every time.
	And we still have a great example of that today in the form of North Korea.
	I don't know if you've ever looked at a map of the world at night.
	You know, you can get a map of the entire globe at night.
	You look at South Korea, it's lit up like jewels.
	It's nothing but light like the east coast of the United States and Canada.
	And North Korea is dark.
	And the reason for that is that 50, 60 years of barbaric communist despotic rule means a country that's completely unindustrialized, where every single person is malnourished or starving to death, where everyone lives in terror all the time, and where there's nothing but the continual production of labor in labor camps, just like in the Soviet Union and Maoist China.
	So if we were willing to pay attention, we could still see examples of that today, and that's not an anomaly.
	North Korea is exactly what you'd expect given the doctrines upon which it's founded.
	So, alright, so more on the Gulag.
	At one level, the Gulag Archipelago traces the history of forced labor camps that existed in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956, started with Lenin's original decrees shortly after the October Revolution, establishing started with Lenin's original decrees shortly after the October Revolution, establishing the legal and practical framework for a series of camps where political prisoners and ordinary criminals would be sentenced to forced
	It describes and discusses the waves of purges, Assembling the show trials in context of the development of the greater gulag system with particular attention to the legal and bureaucratic development.
	The legal and historical narrative ends in 1956, the time of Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Party Congress denouncing Stalin's personality cult, his autocratic power, and the surveillance that pervaded the Stalin era.
	Though the speech was not published in the USSR for a long time, it was a break with the most atrocious practices of the gulag system.
	Solzhenitsyn was aware, however, that the outlines of the system had survived and could be revived and expanded by future leaders.
	Despite the efforts by Solzhenitsyn and others to confront the legacy of the Gulag, the reality of the camps remained taboo until the 1980s.
	While Khrushchev, the Communist Party, and the Soviet Union supporters in the West viewed the Gulag as a deviation of Stalin, Solzhenitsyn and many among the opposition tended to view it as a systematic fault of Soviet political culture and an inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik political project.
	Parallel to this historical and legal narrative, Solzhenitsyn follows the typical course of a zek, a slang term for inmate, derived from the widely used abbreviation zed slash k for zaklyuchenny, I guess, prisoner through the gulag, starting with arrest, show trial, and initial internment.
	Transport to the archipelago, treatment of prisoners and general living conditions, slave labor gangs and the technical prison camp system, camp rebellions and strikes, the practice of internal exile following completion of the original prison sentence, and the ultimate but not guaranteed release of the prisoner.
	Along the ways Solzhenitsyn's examinations detail the trivial and commonplace events of an average prisoner of life.
	of an average prisoner's life, as well as specific and noteworthy events during the history of the Gulag system, including revolts and uprising.
	Aside from using his experiences as an inmate at a scientific prison, Solzhenitsyn draws from the testimony of 227 fellow prisoners, the first-hand accounts which base the work.
	One chapter of the third volume of the book is written by a prisoner named George Yorgi, probably Tenno, whose exploits enraptured Solzhenitsyn to the extent that he offered to name Tenno as co-author of the book.
	Tenno declined.
	Solzhenitsyn also poetically reintroduces his character of Ivan Denisovich toward the conclusion of the book.
	When questioned by the book's author if he has faithfully recounted the story of the gulag, Denisovich, now apparently freed from the camps, replies that, you, the author, have not even begun.
	The sheer volume of first-hand testimony and primary documentation that Solzhenitsyn managed to assemble in the Gulag Archipelago made all subsequent Soviet and KGB attempts to discredit the work useless.
	Much of the impact of the treatise stems from the closely detailed stories of interrogation routines, prison indignities, and, especially in Section 3, camp massacres and inhuman practices.
	There had been works about the Soviet prison camp system before, and its existence had been known to the Western public since the 1930s.
	However, never before had the general reading public been brought face to face with the horrors of the Gulag in this way.
	The controversy surrounding this text in particular was largely due to the way Solzhenitsyn definitively and painstakingly laid the theoretical, legal, and practical origins of the gulag system at Lenin's feet, not Stalin's.
	According to Solzhenitsyn's testimony, Stalin merely amplified a concentration camp system that was already in place.
	This is significant, as many Western intellectuals viewed the Soviet concentration camp system as a Stalinist aberration.
	Solzhenitsyn documented that the Soviet government could not govern without the threat of imprisonment, and that Soviet economy depended on the productivity of the forced labor camps, especially insofar as the development and construction of public works and infrastructure were concerned.
	This put into doubt the entire moral standing of the Soviet system.
	In Western Europe, the book eventually contributed strongly to a need for rethinking of the historical role of Lenin.
	With the Gulag Archipelago, Lenin's political and historical legacy became problematic.
	Yeah, problematic.
	And those factions of Western Communist parties who still base their economic and political ideology on Lenin were left with a heavy burden of proof against them.
	George F. Kennan, the influential US diplomat, called the Gulag Archipelago the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times.
	The book was published at a time when many communists in the West were already rethinking their relationships with the USSR, as many were deeply disappointed by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
	In Germany it sparked discussions not only about Leninism, but also how to deal with the memory of World War II. In an interview with German weekly Die Zeit, British historian Orlando Fijes asserted that many Gulag inmates he interviewed for his research identified so strongly with the book's contents that they became unable to distinguish between their own experiences and what they read.
	The Gulag archipelago spoke for a whole nation and was the voice of those who had suffered.
	After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow during 1957 to 1967, the preparatory drafts of the Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished manuscripts.
	Sometimes in hiding at his friends' homes in the Moscow region and elsewhere.
	While held at the KGB's Lubyanka prison in 1945, Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Estonian minister of education, who'd been taken captive after the Soviet Union occupied Estonia in 1940.
	Solzhenitsyn entrusted Susi with the original typed and proofread manuscript of the finished work.
	After copies had been made of it both on paper and on microfilm, Arnold Susie's daughter, Heli Susie, subsequently kept the master copy hidden from the KGB in Estonia until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
	The KGB seized one of the only three extant copies of the text still on Soviet soil, and the people who held the copies were unaware of the existence of the other copies.
	This they achieved after interrogating Elizaveta Voronskayana, one of Solzhenitsyn's trusted typists, who knew where the typed copy was hidden.
	Within days of release by the KGB, she hanged herself.
	The first edition of the work was published in Russian by the French publishing house Editions du Soy a few days after Christmas 1973.
	They had received a go-ahead from Solzhenitsyn, but had decided to release the work about ten days earlier than he had expected.
	News of the nature of the work immediately caused a stir, and translations into many other languages followed within the next few months, sometimes produced in a race against time.
	American Thomas Whitney produced the English version.
	The English and French translations of volume one appeared in the spring and summer of 1974.
	Solzhenitsyn had wanted the manuscript to be published in Russia first, but knew this was impossible under conditions then extant.
	The work made a profound impact internationally.
	Not only did it provoke energetic debate in the West, a mere six weeks after the work had left Parisian presses, Solzhenitsyn himself was forced into exile.
	Because possession of the manuscript incurred the risk of a long prison sentence for anti-Soviet activities Solzhenitsyn never worked on the manuscript in complete form.
	Since he was under constant KGB surveillance he worked on only one part of the manuscript at a time so as not to put the full book into jeopardy if he happened to be arrested.
	For this reason, he secreted the various parts of the work throughout Moscow and the surrounding countryside in the care of trusted friends, sometimes purportedly visiting them on the social calls, but actually working on the manuscript in their homes.
	Alright, so...
	Now, I want to show you some things.
	I haven't done this before, but we'll see how it goes.
	I'm going to show you something that happened recently.
	Some of you may be aware of this and some of you not.
	So, this is a video about...
	There was a town meeting that a number of people spoke at, including one shopkeeper from New York.
	And after the meeting, He was interviewed by the press, the TV, and one of the attendees at the meeting was upset about the fact that the press was concentrating on him instead of concentrating on what she regarded as the issues at hand.
	So, I'm going to play this for you to begin with.
	Now, what I'm trying to show you, I want to show you what it means for someone to be ideologically possessed.
	And so you can tell when you're talking to someone like that because, and this is something I learned from reading Solzhenitsyn, is because you can predict absolutely everything they're going to say.
	Once you know the algorithmic substructure of their political ideology, which is usually predicated on about five or six axioms, you can use the axioms to automatically generate speech content.
	You don't even have to hear the person, you can just predict what they're going to say.
	And so that alleviates any responsibility whatsoever they have for thinking.
	And it also allows them to believe that they have full control and full knowledge over the...
	Not only full control and full knowledge about the entire world, but also the capacity to distinguish, without a moment's thought, between those who are on the side of the good and those who are not.
	And that's where the danger really comes.
	So anyways, we'll take a look at this.
	So right now, the news is interviewing a person whose daughter was a heroin addict, I think, is what he said in his public comment, and he's pro-bunker, he's pro-cops.
	And so he's the one getting interviewed and there are like a million people who have spoken about how they've been abused by the cops that they're not being spoken to.
	Only the person who's pro-Bunker who's also a person of color.
	So they got their token and that's the one that they're using.
	I have no idea, we'll find out.
	I have a question.
	I'm actually...
	You were the last one.
	Yes, I was.
	You take the light picture?
	Yeah, sure.
	It's humongous.
	Okay.
	- Humongous what?
	Humongous what? - Humongous. - Humongous what? - Humongous. - Humongous what?
	Humongous what?
	That's what it is.
	Humongous what?
	Is that sexual harassment?
	No, it's humongous.
	Then why did you say that to me?
	That's my name.
	What?
	Humongous what?
	Is that sexual harassment?
	Is that what you just did when you said that to me?
	Why would you say that to me?
	Yes, but my name.
	Why would you say that to me?
	Why would I say it to you?
	Why would you say that to me?
	Why would you ask me my name?
	What?
	Humongous what?
	Humongous what?
	This person just spoke to me in a sexually harassing way.
	Oh, I did not.
	Yeah, he did.
	He said, do you know what my name is?
	And I said, what?
	And he said, humongous.
	What?
	Yeah, yeah.
	This person just sexually harassed me.
	I said I'm humongous.
	Yes, yeah, that's right.
	Humongous what?
	It's humongous.
	Oh, oh, oh, so now you're, so now you're actually pointing to yourself.
	You're actually pointing to your body parts, and you're actually pointing to your body parts, and saying that you're humongous.
	You're actually doing that.
	And this is the person who just got interviewed as a pro-bunker person of color, as if you represent us.
	They're using you as a token and then you speak to me in a sexually harassing manner!
	How dare you!
	How dare you!
	Disgusting!
	Disgusting!
	You just abused a woman!
	You just abused a woman and you have the audacity to say that girls matter!
	How dare you!
	How dare you, you disgusting person!
	Disgusting!
	Don't touch me!
	Don't touch me!
	Are you going to do anything about how he sexually harassed me?
	Are you going to do anything about how he sexually harassed me?
	He's asking me to leave until I've been sexually harassed!
	You're asking me to leave after I've been sexually harassed?
	Did you ask him to leave?
	Did you ask him to leave?
	Are you following him?
	Did you ask him to start sexually harassing me?
	What is your name?
	What is your name?
	You work for the city.
	We are here in a public place.
	You need to tell me what your name is.
	My name is Tanel.
	Yeah, Tanel what?
	And I work for a security firm.
	Tanel what?
	I do not work for a city, okay?
	You work for us, so you don't work for us!
	So that means I don't have to do what you want!
	You don't work for us, that means I don't have to do what you want!
	Now stop raising your voice at me.
	What is your name?
	What is your name?
	Right now you are breaking our building, rules are being...
	No, no, sorry.
	What is your name?
	I've already told you my name.
	No, you haven't.
	What is your full name?
	What is your full name and what company do you work for?
	What is your full name?
	I work for Universal Protection.
	My name is Tanelle Stephanescu.
	Okay.
	Why are you questioning her?
	I'm just asking.
	You are questioning the wrong person.
	He just said that he works for a security company, not the city.
	So I don't have to do what he wants!
	So fuck off!
	Who are you?
	Who are you?
	Did you go after the person who sexually harassed me?
	Did you go off?
	This is universal protection security service.
	Notice how they didn't get the cops here.
	Notice how they didn't get the cops here today.
	They just got some more cops basically.
	So why did you do nothing about the person who sexually harassed me?
	I made it very clear.
	He just sexually harassed me.
	Why did you not go up to him and tell him to stop?
	Why did you not do that?
	Why did you not do that?
	You deal with the gentleman.
	The gentleman's gone already.
	He was a gentleman.
	Why are you here?
	Why are you still here?
	Because we're being really loud and we're disrupting.
	Is it being loud or crying?
	It is in our building, ma'am.
	No, it's not!
	She's standing up for herself.
	I understand, ma'am.
	No, you don't!
	You don't understand anything!
	You don't understand anything!
	So this got a lot of attention online, just so you know.
	And so then she responded because she was quite intensely criticized.
	So here's her response.
	Now I want you to listen to how she speaks.
	My name is Zana and I'm doing this video because we need to talk.
	It's become clear to me that a great deal of us suffer from the illness of patriarchy.
	And it's not just the men who suffer.
	Women can be patriarchal too.
	Women?
	Really?
	But why would they be patriarchal?
	Towards who?
	Other women?
	That's so stupid.
	So many things in our system today come from patriarchy, including racism, colonialism, capitalism, classism, and of course sexism.
	Wow, she thinks she knows everything.
	Guess all these experts with their degrees can just go home.
	One thing to remember though, It's hard to see something when we're really close to it.
	We have to step back sometimes, look at a system critically to see what others might be seeing.
	I wonder if she's done that.
	I'm a woman of color, so I'm going to talk about my experience.
	But many other marginalized people, such as indigenous peoples and queer and transgender people and gender non-conforming people, will have their own thoughts on this also.
	Indigenous who?
	And what the hell is gender non-conforming?
	What are all these labels?
	What is she even talking about?
	Why does this woman think she can speak for everyone?
	I mean, who the hell is she anyways?
	What a drama queen.
	The challenge is that it is very hard for those who are marginalized such as women of color to express how they feel without being called the angry brown woman or the angry black woman or the nagging woman or crazy.
	My god, she just won't stop talking.
	But sometimes I do wonder what women of color are thinking when I make a crass racial or sexual joke in front of them and then I say, just kidding.
	And then afterwards, why do they always turn me down when I ask them to dinner?
	It's because of a phenomenon called white fragility and male fragility.
	White liberals and men in general have been told over and over again that if they just never use the n-word, and they never talk about race, and they never physically molest anyone, then they're not racist or sexist.
	So when I point out that actually, the system of power we live in ensures that all white people are racist and all men are sexist because they profit from a system that marginalizes people of color and non-males, they attack me.
	Just as they've attacked women of color for centuries to retain their power structure.
	Whoa!
	She's the sexist one.
	She's the racist one.
	Why does she hate me?
	Yeah, so I make more money because I'm a man, and I have a lot of privilege, and my voice matters in every sphere of life, but I didn't ask for that.
	That doesn't make me racist or sexist.
	She talks as if men don't have any problems.
	I haven't had a raise in three years!
	I mean, yeah, I haven't spoken up for women or done anything constructive to help women or people of color.
	And I take my privileges without question.
	And I live happily in my own little bubble.
	But that doesn't mean that I'd profit from their suffering.
	It's not my fault they're marginalized.
	I didn't marginalize them.
	So why should I do anything to help them?
	Just because I make more money and have access to all the education and resources and housing and jobs.
	Recently, I was sexually harassed by a man in public, on camera, and the news stations posted the video without my permission with the question, do you consider this sexual harassment?
	This led to a lot of people attacking me and going after me all over social media.
	This is what patriarchy does.
	It causes everyone to attack the victim, the one who is most vulnerable.
	This protects the system of power, which is male sexual dominance.
	How do we even know she's telling the truth about sexual harassment?
	I saw that video in the online reactions from all the men and yeah, they were threatening rape and violence and death all while accusing her of overreacting.
	But just because she's putting her physical safety on a line to talk about this doesn't mean she's right.
	Their main complaint was that I raised my voice.
	They questioned my sanity because I spoke up.
	A patriarchal society wants women to shut up.
	Okay, so now the next thing that happened was she started a funding campaign to help her out and get her to spread her message.
	So, okay, so that was interesting.
	And then what happened was this guy here decided that he was going to start a funding campaign for Hugh Mungus.
	And so he started a funding campaign on a website devoted to funding such projects, and they shut him down.
	So then he started another funding campaign, and he raised $140,000.
	And so this is his interview with Hugh Mungus.
	Let me turn up my mic, Rudy, and let's see if that helps you.
	Is this better?
	What was that?
	Is that better?
	Oh yeah, that's better.
	So you said you were working this morning, blowing leaves?
	Yes, I was in downtown in Seattle blowing.
	What a- what a salt of the earth, man.
	Just got pledged $130,000 and he's out there blowing some fucking leaves.
	Y'all can learn something from your boy humongous here.
	Goddamn.
	You know, we got a new president, but that doesn't mean that the leaves don't need to be still picked up.
	Rudy, how are you feeling right now, dude?
	I feel loved.
	I am really, truly grateful.
	I mean, Last weekend, I was no truck, broke down, ready for an eviction.
	I'm looking out at the sky, and I'm thinking, I think I'm kind of screwed today.
	So I took myself down to a church, and I went and prayed.
	I went and did confession, but my confession didn't meet the criteria at the church.
	So I swear to God.
	What does that mean?
	You see, the father stepped out of the confession room.
	What?
	Oh no, he says, excuse me, but we're going to have to maybe do this after mass.
	And he walked me to the door and I said, Is there a certain way to confess my sins so maybe I can...
	Get a little help from somebody.
	God, I mean, I'm just asking God for help.
	And the dude's like, nah, not here.
	We don't want your ass here.
	I never heard of such a thing.
	It's actually really funny.
	It's one of those things that make you go, hmm.
	And then he...
	Well, I went out the front door and I waited until I got off the church property and I said, what the F was that?
	So I went up...
	So, you know, being...
	Humongous, I'm thinking I'm hungry after that.
	But I see Taco Bell.
	I go over and I've got 75 cents and I'm thinking, I wonder if I could, oh, I was a little short on that one.
	And I'm going, I think I'm going to try another church.
	Halfway between the Mexican restaurant, Larson's Bakery, and the church I was going to, I get a call from you.
	Wow, are you serious?
	I swear to God, I am not kidding.
	That's actually incredible.
	I go, hello?
	Hey.
	I remember you said when I called you, you didn't know it was me, and you're like, I swear to God, I'm having a midlife crisis.
	And then you, like, as if you were speaking to yourself, and then you said, hey, who is this?
	Do you remember that?
	I remember that, yeah.
	And I thought you were somebody else.
	Okay, yeah.
	And so, you said...
	I'm packed up because that lady is getting funded and I'm gonna fund you because it's not fair how she's degraded you.
	And I'm going, you know, I'm gonna keep going to that church.
	Apparently I'm God's messenger.
	I was out of my control the whole time.
	God...
	God bless.
	Papa bless.
	Don't do that stuff.
	Okay, you're actually ascending to heaven right now, it looks like.
	I think God is trying to tell us something right now because the sun, there's a stairway to heaven coming out right from the top left side.
	Oh, there's a light!
	There's a light.
	God finally answered your prayers.
	I really sure have.
	Ethan, you have.
	And those across America and around the world, I really want to I can't really put it into words other than that I realize that what I've learned from others, I'm carrying that message of down with dope, up with hope.
	I feel like if there was a Bible written today, I almost feel like that story would be in there.
	Humongous left the church in despair, walked to Taco Bell with 75 cents in his pocket, and as he realized he didn't have enough for a taco, he got a ring up, not from Ethan, but from the spirit of Papa John, who worked through him in mysterious ways.
	And, you know what I'm gonna do?
	I'm going to go drop $300 off to that church's children's sports program just because.
	Make Humongous an opportunity to help pull people up and not tear them down.
	No hate, let's date.
	I want to make it clear.
	The people that supported me in this effort, fiscally, I will not abuse this.
	I'm not going to turn into some raging drunk that you're going to see on frickin' nightline.
	Yeah, yeah.
	God, that's honestly our worst nightmare.
	We're all going to be like, oh, fuck, what do we do?
	I've already done that stuff when I was in my 20s.
	I'm 52.
	There's no way.
	I mean, there's...
	We'll be following you on Facebook now.
	Okay.
	We'll be watching the humongous journey.
	And God bless you all from this country and around the world.
	I mean, I'm just absolutely grateful.
	So this is from the Gulag Archipelago.
	One of my informants has told me how executions were carried out at Adak, a camp on the Petra 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.
	And see, these were political prisoners who opposed the Soviet system.
	The condemned men, 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.
	This is from Viktor Frankl, from his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps.
	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 swollen and sore 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 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.
	From Solzhenitsyn.
	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, because 60 below was the cut-off for 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, and restraining 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.
	O 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.
	Solzhenitsyn.
	Macbeth's self-justifications for his murders were feeble, and his conscience devoured him.
	Even Aego was a little lamb, too.
	The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses.
	That was because they had no ideology.
	Ideology.
	That is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.
	That is the social theory, which helps to make this act, his act, seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes.
	That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills, by invoking Christianity, the conquerors 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.
	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 am alone at the bonfire, and I can bring it still some more carpenter shavings.
	The compound here 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 Marfino, Shirashka, 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 of the gatehouse 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 to 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 grey work skirt, her feet growing numb from the cold, 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.
	The guard had bungled, and Moscow city buses ran right along the highway.
	When they caught on, it was too late to catch her, and 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, clip, take off all her hair in front of the lineup.
	This wasn't something she had thought up herself.
	This was 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 had said, and she was now 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 6pm, and now it was 11pm.
	She tried to shift from one foot to another, but the guard stuck out his head and shouted, Stand at attention, whore, 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, all right, idiot, come on in.
	The reason they were keeping her out there for 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'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 in you, girl, I promise the whole wide world will read about you.
	This is from John Milton from Paradise Lost.
	For whence 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 to spite the great creator.
	I shall despair.
	There is no creature loves me, and if I die, no soul will pity me.
	Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself?
	That's Shakespeare.
	Solzhenitsyn describes the reactions and actions of staunch Communist Party members imprisoned and devoured by the system they supported and produced.
	Frequently, the camp system vacuumed people up, really, without any concern whatsoever for the niceties of individual guilt or innocence.
	As far as Stalin and his henchmen were concerned, there was probably something that you were guilty about at some point in your past, and there were no shortage of people to inform on you, regardless of whether you had done anything.
	So one of the things that used to happen in the collective apartment buildings, of which there were nowhere near enough of, apartment was that if you could inform on someone down the hall who you know maybe refused to return the quarter cup of salt you had lent them or something like that if you would inform on them and their family would be carted away to the concentration camp system then you got to have their apartment and so in East Germany at the height of the Soviet system one out of three
	people one out of every three people was a government informer And so that meant if you had a family of six people, there were two people in every room that you were ever in who were ready to say to the authorities anything you ever had the temerity to speak and perhaps to tell them all sorts of things that you didn't even do because there was a requirement if you were an informer to ensure that you had something to say every time you came in to inform.
	Well it didn't matter if you were a devout communist because from time to time your door would be kicked down at 3am in the morning and people would come in with jackboots and get you dressed as rapidly as they possibly could and take you away when you were still half awake to the prison in the middle of the city and strip you of your clothes and give you things that didn't fit and shave your head and take you off to a camp and you'd never get to see your family again.
	And that happened to millions of people.
	And it happened to staunch Communists, just like it happened to people who, in principle, were opposed to the system.
	And Solzhenitsyn thought that the staunch Communist Party members who were thrown into the camps had the worst time of everyone, because the people who'd already decided that the system was corrupt weren't really surprised when it happened, even though it was still terrible.
	But the Communist Party members had given their whole life to the system, and then they were picked up just like everyone else.
	And he had a very hard time with them when they came to prison, because most of them Assume that a terrible mistake had been made and that if they just wrote the right people and contacted their former friends, who would now, by the way, have nothing to do with them, that the error would be rectified and they soon would be released.
	So they also assumed that everyone else in the camps was completely guilty and was there for good reason because otherwise the beloved party wouldn't have put them there, but for some reason they had been imprisoned because they were innocent.
	Despite the fact that they were innocent Solzhenitsyn and his friends used to play a game with people like that because he didn't exactly know how to treat them because on the one hand they were victims certainly but on the other hand they were part of the system that had perpetrated precisely the horrors that were visited on them So when they first came in and were still chock full of communist dogma and totalitarian thought and judgmental in every possible way,
	him and his friends would have fun pointing out all the shortages and catastrophes of the Soviet system and then let them run through their algorithmic ideology and to the point of absurdity and then really not spend much time communicating with them until they broke down and decided that things weren't so good for them or everybody else and more or less entered the common Run of humanity once again.
	To say that things were hard 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'd been guilty of nothing as far as the party was concerned.
	Nothing at all.
	It was painful for them to such a degree that it was considered taboo among them, uncomradely, to ask, what were you imprisoned for?
	The only squeamish generation of prisoners, the rest of us with 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 remaining four hours sorting out the minutes of the Congress of Stakanovites, of the bristle and brush industry, of which she had been 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 Yelizaveta Tsetkova in the Kazan prison for long-term prisoners.
	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.
	So that was the Soviet youth organization.
	I won't join the Komsomol and I won't forgive them because of you.
	But if you are 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 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 have to justify its wisdom.
	But that is the price a man pays for entrusting his God-given soul to human dogma.
	Even today, any orthodox communist will affirm that Setkova acted correctly.
	Even today, they cannot be convinced that this is precisely 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 at least now they had come to comprehend their former wretchedness.
	This whole chapter could have been written quite differently if today they had at least forsaken their earlier views.
	But it happened the way Mary Adanielen had dreamed it would.
	If I leave here someday, I'm going to live as if nothing had taken place.
	Loyalty.
	In our view, it is just plain pig-headedness.
	These devotees to the theory of development construed loyalty to that development to mean renunciation of 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 pig-headedness?
	It was not for show and not out of hypocrisy that they argued in the cells in defense of all the government's actions.
	They needed ideological arguments in order to hold onto a sense of their own rightness.
	Otherwise, insanity was not far off.
	I'm going to tell you a story.
	There's a story in Genesis.
	It's the last story in Genesis.
	It's called the Tower of Babel.
	It's a story, a very short story.
	And it occurs after the story of Noah and the flood.
	Flood stories, by the way, are universally distributed except among desert dwellers who have no experience on which to hang the story.
	And Mircea Eliade, who wrote a great series of books called A History of Religious Ideas, documented the central narrative structure of flood stories.
	So what happens is that there's a human settlement and it's washed away by a flood, and the flood is generally envisioned as a consequence of God's judgment.
	And so, if you take the flood stories that are distributed worldwide and you boil them down to pull out their archetypal substructure, you find that there are fundamentally two reasons that a flood occurs.
	And Iliadis says that it's the tendency of things to fall apart, Combined with the proclivity of human beings to sin.
	And so, it means something.
	This means something.
	It means that everything is subject to entropic decay, right?
	Things fall apart of their own accord across time.
	That's why you have to always fix things.
	So if it's complicated, it has to be maintained.
	And so you can think about that in relationship to, say, New Orleans, before the hurricane.
	Because people say, well, the hurricane caused a flood and that destroyed much of New Orleans.
	And so that's an act of God.
	That's one way of looking at it, right?
	It's a random, natural event.
	But then you think, well, wait a minute.
	The Dutch...
	Their country is mostly underwater, right?
	So they have these huge dikes to keep the sea back, and they build the dikes so that only one storm every 10,000 years will be of sufficient magnitude to partially breach the dikes.
	That's their engineering tolerance level.
	One storm in every 10,000 years.
	The US Army Corps of Engineers knew that the dikes in New Orleans were built to withstand one storm every hundred years, the biggest storm every hundred years.
	And people knew that they weren't built to proper tolerance and much of the money that was hypothetically supposed to be Diverted or assigned to the rebuilding and maintenance of the dikes Disappeared because of corruption in New Orleans Which is in one of the most corrupt states in the United States And so, you might say, well, why did the flood destroy New Orleans?
	And one answer is, well, it was a hurricane And the other answer is, no It was corrupt officials who weren't paying attention to what they were supposed to be paying attention to.
	And the flood came, and that's the meaning of the stories, because of the sins of men, so to speak, which is the capacity of people to turn a blind eye to their responsibilities when they know perfectly well that something needs to be done.
	And so if you don't do what needs to be done, and something comes along to wipe you out, then it's perfectly reasonable to view that as a judgment on your refusal to do what you knew to be right.
	So that's the flood story.
	And then the Tower of Babel is a very interesting story.
	It's very, very short.
	And what happens is that it just starts pretty much abruptly after the flood story ends.
	And it's a story about the decision that human beings take to build a mighty building, like a huge, huge edifice, that would reach all the way up to the heavens to supplant God, roughly speaking.
	And so what happens is the building is built higher and higher and higher and higher and God gets annoyed about this and divides everyone who's building the building into small groups who speak different languages, who then disperse and the construction project comes to a halt.
	Now, it's a very strange story, but here's one way of thinking about it The larger you build a system, the more there's a proclivity to worship it as if it's everything That's the story of ideology, let's say.
	You want to build a comprehensive utopian system that supplants anything transcendent.
	You want to build it as large as possible so it encompasses everyone.
	Well, what happens as it grows?
	Well, it incorporates more and more people, but the people within it become more and more different from one another.
	And so, essentially, they start speaking different languages.
	And so the entire project of raising this massive edifice to supplant everything disperses into chaos and comes to a halt.
	Okay, so that's one story.
	So here's another story.
	This is a story that John Milton wrote.
	John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, which is one of the prime literary masterpieces of the last 500 years.
	Now, here's what Milton did.
	Milton said he was trying to justify the ways of God to man.
	That was his purpose, and so what he was trying to do was take a look at the world, the way it's constituted, with all its suffering and malevolence and corruption, and to make a case why it was still acceptable.
	And so he did the first, what you might think about as psychoanalytic study of malevolence and evil.
	So, around the corpus of biblical writings, there's an idea of heaven and hell, and they're not referred to much within the corpus of biblical writings, but there are What you might describe as legends that have compiled around them.
	So they're stories that never became canonical.
	And those are stories, for example, of the idea that God's highest angel, who was Satan, Lucifer, the bringer of light, the spirit of rationality, fomented a rebellion against God in heaven and was cast into hell as a consequence.
	And so there's this idea.
	Milton wrote this before the rise of the nation-states, for example.
	There's this idea.
	There's this idea that there's this tension between the political and ideological and rational constructions of the rational mind and the sort of transcendent mythology that guides human Organization.
	And that Satan, as the highest angel in God's heavenly kingdom, is a personification of the tendency of the rational mind to produce totalitarian systems and then to fall in love with them.
	So to produce a system that encompasses everything, like the Tower of Babel, so that nothing outside the system is allowed to exist.
	Well, Milton's intuition, because he collected the stories about satanic rebellion that had been accumulating across centuries from far before Christianity was even constituted, turned this into a great poetic drama.
	And his hypothesis was that the element of the psyche, let's say, the spiritual element of the psyche that characterized the rational mind, would, by its proclivity to produce these totalizing systems, end up casting itself into hell.
	And so you could think about it as a prophetic visualization of what was going to come down the centuries after Milton wrote.
	Because the poets get there before the philosophers.
	The artists get there maybe before the poets.
	The philosophers follow in their wake.
	The poets are the people who have the visions of what's coming farthest down the road.
	So this is from Milton.
	This is describing Satan after he's cast into hell because of his rebellion, the consequence of his totalitarian rationalism.
	For now the thought both of lost happiness and lasting pain torments him.
	Round he throws his baleful eyes that witnessed huge affliction and dismay mixed With obdurate pride and steadfast hate, at once, as far as angels can, he views the dismal situation, waste and wild, a dungeon horrible,
	on all sides round, as one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames no light But rather darkness visible, served only to discover sites of woe, regions of sorrow, doleful shades where peace and rest can never dwell.
	Hope never comes that comes to all, but torture without end still urges, and a fiery deluge fed with ever-burning sulfur unconsumed.
	Such place eternal justice had prepared for those rebellious.
	Here their prison ordained in utter darkness and their portion set as far removed from God and light of heaven as from the center thrice to the utmost pole.
	It's an existentialist claim or maybe it's the existentialist claim that the Conditions of human life are such that suffering is an integral part of existence.
	Now, it's an important thing to understand.
	It's also a viewpoint shared by the bulk of the great religious systems of the world.
	Life is suffering.
	Why?
	Well, one reason is because of society's arbitrary judgment, right?
	Every single one of us has Traits and features and quirks and idiosyncrasies that are far from ideal.
	And that are judged by the standards of society as insufficient.
	And so you suffer because of your imperfect insufficiency in the eyes of others.
	And you can certainly make the claim that Fairly frequently that's arbitrary and so that's the claim that society is tyrannical and judgmental and needs to be constantly reconstituted so that the tyrannical element doesn't take full control and fair enough you have to stay awake so that that doesn't happen but the thing is it doesn't matter What society it is,
	although they vary in the degree of their tyranny, the mere fact that you're grouped together with other people and have to come up with a common value structure in order to live together means that many of the things that characterize you are going to be suboptimal.
	And so the price you pay for social being is that much of you is deemed insufficient.
	Now hopefully there are various ways that you can be within a society that's sufficiently diverse so that you can find a place where what's good about you in the eyes of others and perhaps in your own eyes can flourish of its own accord.
	Because you don't have to be good at everything.
	If you can be good at one thing well enough, that might allow you your niche.
	And hopefully a healthy society allows for that.
	Certainly societies can become so tyrannical that they don't.
	So you can lay one source of human suffering at the feet of tyrannical social structures, but the other element of it, clearly, is the mere fact of the Arbitrariness of the natural world.
	You have a lifespan that's going to be counted in the number of decades that you can count on two hands.
	And that has nothing to do, technically, with the tyranny of the social structure.
	Now, you could say, if we got our act together more completely, perhaps you could live longer, and fair enough.
	But the fact of the limits of your lifespan and the suffering that's necessarily a consequence of that, the death of your parents and the death of most people that you will know before you, Means that that part of suffering is an integral part of existence itself.
	And so, that can't be laid at the feet of an insufficient social structure except insofar as it's tyrannical and blind.
	It's a condition of existence.
	And then, by the same token, you have your own responsibility for some of your unnecessary suffering because there's things you could be doing to make your life better and to make life better for other people that you know perfectly well that you're not doing.
	And so, if you stopped doing all the unnecessary things that make your life bad, then it would improve to some degree that is not really computable because you don't know how far you could push that.
	So there's three reasons why you suffer, and one is, well, look at you and the way you're built.
	It's inevitable.
	There's not very much of you and there's a lot of everything else.
	And so, you just don't last that long and you're fragile across multiple domains and then you're harshly treated by society and there's no doubt about that and then there's responsibility that can be laid at your own feet Well, the existential take on that and the thing that all these diverse people that we've been talking about including Viktor Frankl and including Alexander Solzhenitsyn as well as Kierkegaard,
	Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and the people that I've already talked to you about is that the proper pathway through that is to adopt the mode of authentic being.
	And that is something like refusing to participate in the lie, in deception in the lie, to orient your speech as much as you can towards the truth.
	And to take responsibility for your own life and perhaps also for the lives of other people.
	And there's something about that that's meaningful and responsible and noble, but also serves to mitigate the very suffering that produces, say, the nihilism or the escape into the arms of totalitarians to begin with.
	You need something to shelter you against your own vulnerability.
	And you can adopt a comprehensive description of reality that's formulated for you by someone else, that neatly divides the world into those who are innocent, and perhaps innocent victims, and those who are guilty, and perhaps the perpetrators of the suffering.
	But none of that has anything to do with you, and in addition, it's simply not a reasonable way of assessing the world.
	The suffering is built in.
	So that's why there's an existentialist insistence upon that.
	So for the Freudians, the psychoanalysts, and even for people like Carl Rogers to some degree, if you're in a situation that's characterized by psychopathology, if there's something wrong with you mentally, that's a consequence of something gone wrong.
	But that's not the existentialist take.
	The existentialist take is, no, that's just how it is.
	That's just how it is.
	You don't have to necessarily have done anything wrong for things to get completely out of control.
	It's a terrifying doctrine.
	But it's not a hopeless doctrine because it still says that there's a way forward.
	There's a pathway forward.
	And the pathway forward is to adopt a mode of being that has some nobility.
	So that you can tolerate yourself and perhaps even have some respect for yourself as someone who's capable of standing up in the face of that terrible vulnerability and suffering.
	And that the pathway forward, as far as the existentialists are concerned, is by...
	Well, certainly by the avoidance of deceit, particularly in language, but also by the adoption of responsibility for the conditions of existence and some attempt on your part to actually rectify them.
	And the thing that's so interesting about that is, well, too, as far as I'm concerned, And some of this is from clinical experience.
	You know, if you take people, and I've told you this, and you expose them voluntarily to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of, you know, that they know they need to overcome in order to meet their goals, their self-defined goals.
	If you can teach people to stand up in the face of the things they're afraid of, they get stronger.
	And you don't know what the upper limits to that are, because you might ask yourself, like, if for 10 years, if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do, by your own definitions, right, within the value structure that you've created, to the degree that you've done that, what would you be like?
	Well, you know, there are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time, and there are people who do find out over decades-long periods what they could be like if they were who they were.
	If they said, if they spoke their being forward.
	And they get stronger and stronger and stronger and we don't know the limits to that.
	We do not know the limits to that.
	And so you could say, well in part, perhaps the reason that you're suffering unbearably can be left at your feet.
	Because you're not everything you could be and you know it.
	And of course that's a terrible thing to admit and it's a terrible thing to consider.
	But there's real promise in it, right?
	Because it means that Perhaps there's another way that you could look at the world, and another way that you could act in the world, so what it would reflect back to you would be much better than what it reflects back to you now.
	And then the second part of that is, well, imagine that many people did that, because we've done a lot as human beings, we've done a lot of remarkable things, and I've told you already, I think before, that today, for example, about 250,000 people will be lifted out of abject poverty, and about 300,000 people attached to the electrical power grid, We're making people, we're lifting people out of poverty collectively at a faster rate that's ever occurred in the history of humankind by a huge margin.
	And that's been going on unbelievably quickly since the year 2000.
	The UN had planned to halve poverty between 2000 and 2015 and it was accomplished by 2013.
	So there's inequality developing in many places, and you hear lots of political agitation about that.
	But overall, the tide is lifting everyone up, and that's a great thing.
	We have no idea how fast we could multiply that if people got their act together and really aimed at it.
	Because, you know, my experience is with people that we're probably running at about 51% of our capacity.
	I mean, you can think about this yourselves.
	I often ask undergraduates, How many hours a day you waste?
	Or how many hours a week you waste?
	And the classic answer is something like four to six hours a day.
	You know, inefficient studying, watching things on YouTube that not only do you not want to watch, that you don't even care about, that make you feel horrible about watching after you're done.
	That's probably four hours right there.
	You know, you think, well that's twenty, twenty-five hours a week, it's a hundred hours a month, that's two and a half full work weeks, it's half a year of work weeks per year!
	And if your time is worth twenty dollars an hour, which is a radical underestimate, it's probably more like fifty, if you think about it in terms of deferred wages, if you're wasting twenty hours a week, you're wasting fifty thousand dollars a year, and you are doing that right now, and it's Because you're young, wasting $50,000 a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it, because I'm not gonna last nearly as long.
	And so if your life isn't everything it could be, you could ask yourself, well, what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you?
	You'd be, who knows how much more efficient?
	10 times more efficient.
	20 times more efficient.
	That's the Pareto distribution.
	You have no idea how efficient, efficient people get.
	It's completely, it's off the charts.
	Well, and if we all got our act together collectively and stopped making things worse, because that's another thing people do all the time, not only do they not do what they should to make things better, they actively attempt to make things worse because they're spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or homicidal or genocidal or all of those things all Bundled together in an absolutely pathological package,
	if people stopped really, really trying just to make things worse, we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that.
	So there's this weird dynamic that's part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability, social judgment, both of which are major causes of suffering, and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt.
	And that's the thing that's interesting too, is that...
	Like, another thing I've often asked my undergraduate classes is, you know, there's this idea that people have a conscience.
	And you know what the conscience is.
	It's this feeling or voice you have in your head just before you do something that you know is stupid, telling you that probably you shouldn't do that stupid thing.
	You don't have to listen to it, strangely enough.
	But you go ahead and do it anyways, and then, of course, exactly what the conscience told you was going to happen inevitably happened, so that you feel even stupider about it than you would if it happened by accident.
	Because, you know, I knew this was going to happen, I got a warning it was going to happen, and I went and did it anyways.
	And the funny thing, too, is that that conscience operates within people, and we really don't understand what the hell that is.
	So you might say, well, what would happen if you abided by your conscience for five years or for ten years?
	What sort of position might you be in?
	What sort of family might you have?
	What sort of relationship might you be able to forge?
	And you can be bloody sure that a relationship that's forged on the basis of who you actually are is going to be a lot stronger and more welcome than one that's forged on the basis of who you aren't.
	Now, of course, that means that the person you're with has to deal with the full force of you in all your ability and your catastrophe, and that's a very, very difficult thing to negotiate.
	But if you do negotiate it, well, at least you have somewhere solid to stand, and you have somewhere to live.
	You have a real life, and it's a great basis Upon which to bring children into the world, for example, because you can have an actual relationship with them instead of torturing them half to death, which is what happens in a tremendously large minority of cases.
	Well, it's more than that, too, because, and this is what I'll close with, and this is why I wanted to introduce Solzhenitsyn's writings to you, you see, because...
	It isn't merely that your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to what degree you decide that you're going to live out your own genuine being.
	It isn't only your fate.
	It's the fate of everyone that you're networked with.
	And so, you know, you think, well...
	There's nine billion, seven billion people in the world.
	We're going to peak at about nine billion, by the way, and then it'll decline rapidly, but seven billion people in the world, and who are you?
	You're just one little dust moat among that seven billion, and so it really doesn't matter what you do or don't do, but that's simply not the case.
	It's the wrong model, because you're at the center of a network.
	You're a node in a network.
	Of course, that's even more true now that we have social media.
	You'll know a thousand people, at least, over the course of your life.
	And they'll know a thousand people each.
	And that puts you one person away from a million.
	And two persons away from a billion.
	And so that's how you're connected.
	And the things you do, they're like dropping a stone in a pond.
	The ripples move outward.
	And they affect things in ways that you can't fully comprehend.
	And it means that the things that you do and that you don't do are far more important than you think.
	And so if you act that way, of course, the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what you do.
	And you might say, well, that's better than living a meaningless existence.
	It's better for it to matter.
	But I mean, if you really asked yourself, would you be so sure if you had the choice?
	I can live with no responsibility whatsoever.
	The price I pay is that nothing matters.
	Or I can reverse it and everything matters.
	But I have to take the responsibility that's associated with that.
	It's not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path.
	Now when you say, well, nihilists suffer dreadfully because there's no meaning in their life and they still suffer.
	Yeah, but the advantage is they have no responsibility.
	So that's the payoff, and I actually think that's the motivation.
	Say, well, I can't help being nihilistic.
	All my belief systems have collapsed.
	It's like, yeah, maybe.
	Maybe you've just allowed them to collapse because it's a hell of a lot easier than acting them out.
	And the price you pay is some meaningless suffering.
	But you can always whine about that, and people will feel sorry for you.
	And you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr.
	So that's a pretty good deal, all things considered.
	Especially when the alternative is to...
	Bear your burden properly and to live forthrightly in the world.
	Well, what Solzhenitsyn figured out, and so many people in the 20th century, it's not just him, even though he's the best example, is that if you live a pathological life, you pathologize your society.
	And if enough people do that, then it's hell.
	Really.
	Really.
	And you can read the Gulag Archipelago if you have the fortitude to do that.
	And you'll see exactly what hell is like.
	And then you can decide if that's a place you'd like to visit.
	Or even more importantly, if it's a place you'd like to visit and take all your family and friends.

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