June 13, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:26:18
3714 Crime and Punishment | Vox Day and Stefan Molyneux
Book Summary: “Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in Saint Petersburg who formulates and executes a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her cash. Raskolnikov, in an attempt to defend his actions, argues that with the pawnbroker's money he can perform good deeds to counterbalance the crime, while ridding the world of a vermin. He also commits the murder to test a theory of his that dictates some people are naturally capable of such actions, and even have the right to perform them. Several times throughout the novel, Raskolnikov compares himself with Napoleon Bonaparte and shares his belief that murder is permissible in pursuit of a higher purpose.”Vox Day is a multiple-time Hugo Award nominee who writes epic fantasy as well as non-fiction including “SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police” and “Cuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed America.”Vox is also a professional game designer and maintains a pair of popular blogs, Vox Popoli and Alpha Game, which average millions of pageviews each month. He is the lead designer of next-generation Wikipedia replacement Infogalactic and also runs Castalia House publishing.Vox Day's Books: http://www.fdrurl.com/vox-dayVox Day's Blog: http://voxday.blogspot.comCastalia House: http://www.castaliahouse.comInfogalactic: https://infogalactic.comVox Day on Periscope: https://www.periscope.tv/voxday/SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Policehttp://www.fdrurl.com/SJW-Always-LieCuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed Americahttp://www.fdrurl.com/cuckservativeYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Back with a good friend, Vox Day.
He is a multiple-time Hugo Award nominee who writes epic fantasy, as well as non-fiction, including Social Justice Warriors Always Lie, Taking Down the Thought Police, and Cuxervative, How, Quote, Conservatives Betrayed America.
He's also a professional game designer and maintains a pair of popular blogs, Vox Populi and Alpha Game.
He is also the lead designer of next-generation Wikipedia replacement InfoGalactic, It is always good to chat with you, although I have to admit, this is the first time you've ever given me homework.
Well, yes, so we're going to talk about Crime and Punishment, the greatest novel, in my view, to come out of the 19th century, unless you like your things shorter, in which case Tegenev's Fathers and Sons is good, which I actually adapted into a play when I was in theatre school and ran for a summer in Toronto.
But, yes, so you've read the book since we last talked.
And we're going to assume that people have some knowledge of the book.
I don't want to sort of give people the run through.
And even if you've never read the book, this is going to be a great chat anyway.
So what was your impression?
What were your thoughts on the book?
Well, you know, I'd read the book before.
This was not my first time reading it.
What really struck me this time was that I was slightly, very slightly, less impressed with it this time than I was before.
Back when I'd read it in...
I think I'd read it twice before.
Once in high school and another time either in college or recently right after graduating.
And I was kind of wondering why that was.
And what I realized was that I'm now reading it somewhat with the eye of an editor.
And so it was interesting to me that I was able this time...
To pick up the fact that it was written more as a serial rather than as a coherent novel structure.
Oh, he had a terrible methodology for writing books.
I mean, he'd just start and keep going.
He would just pace around and dictate sometimes, so it was not often well-stitched together.
Yeah, and that was what was interesting to me is that You know, I'm reading this and here this is one of the great novels of human literature.
I mean, it absolutely is.
And yet, its greatness does not derive from being a utter masterpiece of literary style, of plot, or of structure.
I mean, there's a lot of...
The sort of people that like to break down the literary structure of a book and look for significance in every single word.
One thing that you'll see SJWs love to do is they'll talk about how not a single word is wasted.
They like to pretend that every single word in a book is chock full of meaning and they want to perform exegesis on everything.
The fact that A shirt is blue is significant versus a ring being yellow and all this sort of thing.
And the fact of the matter is, and speaking as someone who's both an author and an editor, I think that the vast majority of the time those ideas and those claims are utter nonsense.
Well, I mean, of course, he jammed kind of two stories together because he was working on a book called The Drunkard, which survives as the character of Marmaladov and his family and so on, a terrifying portrayal of alcohol addiction, something I've never really understood.
Like heroin addiction, I've never tried heroin, of course, but I hear it's fantastic.
I've had a couple of drinks, I feel kind of nauseous, and I want to go to sleep.
So...
I really, really don't understand it, but it's a really powerful portrayal.
And of course, Dostoevsky himself had a very addictive personality, ended up addicted to gambling and other things and so on.
So he had the story called The Drunken, which he kind of crashed into crime and punishment.
So the idea that this is somehow all thought out ahead of time in the sort of 13-year odyssey of Atlas Shrugged to me is, well, doesn't accord with how it was developed at all.
But I think it's also testimony to the difference between a very talented character I mean, there's nothing that makes you want to quit writing like seeing how well and how much a talented writer can turn out in a very short period of time.
I think the idea that The greatness of a work like Crime and Punishment somehow has something to do with how carefully plotted or how minutely detailed everything was planned out is actually lesser writers trying to convince themselves that they can be great.
A few more flowcharts and I'm a genius.
Exactly.
I'll give you an example.
We published a book called Swan Knight's Son by John C. Wright.
John C. Wright is a great writer, not necessarily in the Dostoevsky sense, but just in the sense of he's just on that level that most of us lesser writers simply cannot do.
The reason that I know this is because he turned in the book, and I was reading it, and I called him up.
I said, you know, the first chapter, I think it sucks.
It's not interesting.
You know, you've got this guy sitting in a room talking to a bird and literally nothing happens.
I said, in fact, it actually makes you dislike the protagonist.
I said, so, you know, do something different.
I said, I'd like to see something a little bit more ominous, something that creates some sort of sense of foreboding because there's some real tension and dark stuff that is to come.
And he says, I said, you know, I should look at Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, something kind of like that.
He's like, okay.
And I'm thinking I'm going to get something, you know, in a week or two.
And literally, the next day, there's this new first chapter.
It's called The 13th Hour.
And it conceives of this whole 13th hour that humanity is not conscious of, but we're all...
under an elven spell and the humans are going out sleepwalking, going over to the place where the elves receive their tribute.
And this kid is awake and he can see it.
And I mean, it's just exceptionally creepy.
And this is just a wonderful introduction.
It's so well written.
And I know the guy did it in 12 hours.
This reminds me, in the movie American Psycho, Willem Dafoe plays, because we're sort of slowly circling our way back to the Boffieri character in Crime and Punishment.
But Willem Dafoe, who's a great actor, portrays a sort of guy who's after the sort of serial killer.
And when I was in theater school, you know, you read your Ute Hagen and your Stanislavski and your method acting and all this preparation and this and that and the other...
And I remember reading an interview with the director who said, you know, I couldn't figure out how to play the scene where this guy first confronts the potential serial killer.
So I said, okay, come in like you know for sure that he did it.
Okay, come in like you have no idea whether he did it.
Now come in like it's just raining.
Now come in and he just would do the take differently and every take was perfect.
And it's like, sorry, that's just a huge amount of talent that no amount of preparation is going to allow you to reproduce.
So the book...
It was written, I think, late 1850s, early 1860s.
Now, the central idea or the central argument goes something like this.
After the example of Napoleon, Napoleon and Darwin, two huge forces in 19th century thought.
Napoleon, because he was just this general in the French army, he conducted a massacre in Paris.
He abandoned an entire army in Egypt.
And he also, of course, lost half a million men invading Russia, which seems to be a disastrous habit of Western Europeans over history.
And he became emperor, rewrote France's penal code and so on, and spent most of his career invading just about every piece of land that he could lay his eyes and his scimitars on.
And this was just an act of will.
This was just an act of will.
And he was a criminal in many ways.
He broke laws.
He killed huge numbers of people.
He rewrote the map.
And he became sort of a great man.
So that combination of what was called the Ubermensch or the Superman or the man who steps over, right, in Russian, crime is also synonymous with the word stepping over something.
Can you step over ordinary human morality, legal morality, Christian morality?
Can you just step over it as so many people throughout history who are castigated as criminals in their lives and often end up with bronze statues and they end up on postage stamps after their deaths?
And so if you combine the will to power that Napoleon and others represented with this Darwinian explosion, the course of the Darwinian books on natural selection and evolution were published some few years before Crime and Punishment, wherein this Bland, animalistic striving for domination, which is the sort of pyramid of the animal kingdom as a whole.
The will to power over political structures combined with the scrubbing of the soul and of divine commandments and the looking at the sort of bare forked animal triumphing and eating and hunting and screwing and reproducing and so on gave people a very, very tremulous sense of A bare, amoral universe of striving for power.
Of course, Nietzsche was talking about this a lot, but Nietzsche, of course, was after Dostoevsky.
And I know Nietzsche found out about Dostoevsky later in Nietzsche's life a couple of years before he went crazy, so didn't have much influence.
Although, to be fair, Nietzsche did say that Dostoevsky was the only psychologist he had anything to learn from.
But I think this question of Can you overstep ordinary, bland, historical moral imperatives when you have a universe scrubbed of divine commandments was terrifying.
And it's terrifying not just because it's about one crazy guy in St.
Petersburg, but also because, as he dreams in the end, what if everyone takes this perspective?
What if everyone decides to step over morality?
What if everyone tries to will their own morality?
Growth to power and dominance.
What happens to society then?
And of course, the 20th century, I think, was one of the dominoes that fell on the face at least of Western European humanity as a result of this kind of emptying out of the moral imperatives of the universe.
Well, I think that one thing we've seen is that moralities have a certain inertia to them.
It's one thing to talk about the stepping over In theory.
It's another thing to actually do it.
And furthermore, when you decide that morality is something that is merely a social construct or a historical artifact or however else you want to dismiss it, what you find, and this is actually one thing that I think both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche missed, is that Morality is not the only target of that deconstruction.
What we've seen is that everything becomes subject to that.
The concept of the nation, the concept of states, the concept of sexual gender, the concept of what is and what is not human.
All of these things are suddenly...
I think that that is a development that even the best minds of that century did not and obviously could not have foreseen.
They were focused very much more on the religious aspects of it.
It's so common when you talk to people in college or smart folks that That are being tempted to transgress and are being tempted to dismiss and test those limits.
So much of that tends to come down to a very simple and very focused perspective on what they happen to want that they need to transgress to get.
So for most of us, It tends to involve having sex in some way that morality or tradition would frown upon.
But there are also other things.
In Napoleon's case, he wanted to conquer Europe.
It was the whole national boundaries thing he had a little trouble with.
But I think it's interesting that there's no limit to that deconstructive process.
And so...
We get to the point where even the most basic Aristotelian logic, you know, A cannot be not A, the law of exclusion, suddenly even that gets deconstructed.
And so we literally lose our ability to reason.
We lose our ability to do science.
We lose our ability to even communicate things.
Effectively with other human beings, because suddenly, is no longer necessarily means is.
And so, I think that the brilliance of crime and punishment is it shows us that first fatal step towards whatever you want to call it.
I mean, I don't even think that nihilism, the nihilism that people complained of, and the That the radicals wanted to disavow.
They said that his anarchism, Dostoevsky's anarchism, the portrayal there is not what we mean by it.
The nihilism there is not what we mean by it, which is the usual dodge.
But to me, the interesting thing is that he was one of the first to understand the direction that that process would lead.
And that it becomes cowardice to obey traditional, sensible moral rules.
This to me is one of the fascinating – so the very brief setup for the story is that Raskolnikov is a student and he's run out of money because his family's poor.
And there's this vicious, nasty, parasitical, ugly, greasy-haired old woman who's a porn broker, right?
She takes goods from desperate people and gives them a little bit of money.
And if they don't pay her back, she gets to keep the goods.
She's considered parasitical.
And she has this kind of idiot sister who is gentle and nice and sweet and all that.
And Raskolnikov, of course, is possessed by the idea.
And the idea comes out of ideology.
The idea comes out of an essay that he writes, which is that a man wills and a man takes, and all of these moral rules are basically set up for cowards to obey their betters.
You're either a master or you are a slave.
You are either an übermensch or an untermensch, right?
right?
You're above rules and you make your own rules and you have the will to power and you glory in all that you can take and possess in the world, or you obey these silly little rules and that are just set up to weed the strong from the weak and so on.
And he says, well, why not just kill this old woman and take her money so that I can go and complete my education, so that I can save my sister from a bad marriage, so that I can enrich my family.
And I'm going to take her money, which she's hoarding and keeping in her grim little porn shop.
Emily, and I'm going to take her money, which she's hoarding and keeping in her grim little porn shop, and I'm going to release it, and I'm going to spend it, and I'm going to help people, I'm going to save people, I'm going to do all this good with this money, which is kind of bound up in this nasty old vermin's lockbox under her bed and so on.
And I'm going to release it and I'm going to spend it and I'm going to help people.
I'm going to save people.
But then he sleeps, and he decides to do it, actually right before.
And the dreams, dreams are fascinating in Dostoevsky, and they're described so vividly, I can't help Vox but think that he must have had these dreams.
These are not dreams that you make up.
Right.
But the dream of the horse beating.
Right before he's going to go and commit the murder.
He sort of spends his time crawled up like a little corner spider in this room that's barely a cupboard on the fifth floor of some brickety old house.
And he owes all this money to the landlady and avoiding her and terrified and frustrated.
Anyway, he has this dream.
I'm sure you've just read it.
It's a really terrifying, powerful dream that I thought was going to have him not do the murder.
The dream is horrific.
And in some ways, to modern sensibilities, it's probably even more shocking because it's violence directed at an animal.
But I think the important thing, just to quickly describe the dream, basically he's a child and he's watching a drunken man essentially mistreat a horse by causing it to drag more weight than it's capable of.
And then in his drunken anger at its inability to do the impossible, he then more or less beats it to death.
And it's tragic, it's horrific.
The young Roselnikov is horrified by this and is weeping and begging the man to stop and all that sort of thing.
But I think one element that a lot of A lot of readers tend to miss about that is that it is actually an emotional argument.
The dream is an emotional, rhetorical argument against the concept of private property.
Several times in the course of the beating, some of the people are egging him on and others are begging him to stop.
And they say, you know, you'll kill the poor beast.
And he keeps saying, it's my property, it's mine to do what I want.
And so I saw the dream as both presaging his transformation into the brutish killer, but I also saw the dream as a justification, his emotional justification for the killing.
Because the woman's right to her property is being questioned because if it is wrong for the man to treat his property any way that he wants, if the beating to death of the horse creates in the reader's mind the idea that someone should be able to stop him and take his property away and do something more useful with it than just killing it.
And so it's actually a rather, intentional or not, it's a rather brilliant device that serves as an emotional rationalization and justification for I think?
As a child.
And of course, remember, I mean, the Russia at the time was largely running on basic slavery, and it was like four or 5% of the population was literate.
And so there was a lot of drunkenness, a lot of brutality, a lot of violence, just astonishing and terrifying stuff.
And his sensitivity as a child, where he's heartbroken over the maltreatment of the horse, and I remember the whipping the horse across the eyes, you know, just stuff that makes you just flinch at a physical level.
But then when he goes through university, and he's exposed to these new ideas, he gets, and again, we've seen this a lot, you know, in Social Justice Warriors, your book, and so on and other, you've got sensitive, nice people in a lot of ways somehow get exposed to a kind of toxic ideology, and it really transforms people.
And you can see pictures of this.
We'll put a link to some below.
But if you've not seen the pictures, they're worth looking at.
And it's women and occasionally men.
But it's women before they go into social justice warrior college indoctrination hell.
Pictures before and pictures after they've gone through this kind of indoctrination.
And to me, this shows the sensitivity that can be corrupted by a whole set of really terrible ideas.
A child who is weeping and heartbroken over the maltreatment of a horse to a man who can basically club two women to death.
Why?
Because he's been exposed to and has generated within himself particular ideas.
And the power of ideas to kill compassion is truly astounding and I think has always been underestimated in the modern world.
I think it's partly that, but another thing that really struck me upon rereading the book is For the first time in 20 years or whatever it's been, was that Dostoevsky did an excellent job of describing or creating a character that very much fit what I call the gamma social sexuality.
Again, I'm going to mess up the pronunciation.
Raskolnikov?
Raskolnikov is how I've heard it pronounced.
Raskolnikov.
Raskolnikov very much has an alarmingly familiar gamma slash SJW thought process that is indicated in the book.
It's particularly noticeable in his negative reaction to his sister's suitor.
I'm not talking about when he actually meets the guy.
When he actually meets the guy, The guy does manage to come off in a bad way, and of course later he comes off even worse.
But when he hasn't even met the guy, and all he knows is that this is somebody who's fairly successful and is offering his sister a way out, just all the negativity and the hatred of the more successful.
It was something that really struck me this time in a way that it hadn't before.
You can tell just from that that here is a young man who is not successful with women.
Actually, you do see it.
He's very awkward.
He's kind of awkward and creepy, even when he's trying to white knight and save the drunken prostitute.
And that's also, if you think about it, that's also a very gamma activity to attempt to interfere with the sexual relations of the more successful men.
It's not – the funny thing is that he can't admit to himself that he too is attracted to the girl.
Thank you.
I mean, think about it.
Why is he following her in order to stop this guy?
It's because obviously he's attracted to her too.
But he can't even admit that to himself.
He just has to play the role of the white knight.
And of course, Fruitlessly, as we know, because the police end up not getting involved and so forth.
I actually see in his character, in that part, someone who's a bit of a proto-SJW and is going through some of those thought processes, obviously to a level that we hope most of the college kids that you're describing don't.
Well, it is remarkable, of course, that he's so concerned with exploitation.
And, of course, this is a trite, I could say, sort of cliche of the social justice warrior, the leftist stuff.
Very, very concerned with exploitation.
The fact that, of course, they're in university because the government is taxing poorer people in general who aren't going to university and giving them the money to go to university, they don't particularly view as exploitation.
But some corporation that's, you know, working with some workers, well, that's just real exploitation – And Lucien, the man who's in pursuit of Raskolnikov's sister's hand, yeah, he's a bit of a shallow guy and all that, but it's a way out that doesn't involve killing someone, and his rage and his hostility towards a successful man, because he had a way of continuing on in college.
He just would have had to take on more...
taught people more.
If he'd sort of done his tutoring and so on, he'd have had enough money to sort of struggle along.
But he didn't want to do that because of the vanity, the vanity.
He just believes that he deserves more.
He's owed more.
And if the universe isn't going to provide it to him, he's damn well going to go out and get it himself.
And he believes that he will be able to overcome any residual, what they would say, bourgeois sentimentality, bourgeois morality, this sort of old school, orthodox or Christian kind of regret or guilt about the death.
And that he is not able to achieve.
And I think that is fascinating.
There's a bit I sort of wrote it down, and I remember it the very, very first time that I read it, where he has this idea that That he's going to be like Napoleon.
He's going to be one of these great men who does whatever they want to achieve their power.
And the way that he actually ends up committing the crime is so sort of vile for him that he has a description of it.
And let me just find it here.
Oh, yes.
Here we go.
Here we go.
He said, no, those men are not made so.
So the real master to whom all is permitted storms Toulon, makes a massacre in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, wastes half a million men in the Moscow expedition, and gets off with a jest at Vilna.
And altars are set up to him after his death, and so all is permitted.
No, such people, it seems, are not of flesh, but of bronze.
So he's talking about how he's enraged, and this is part of the rage of the, quote, successful.
Napoleon gets to do all of these incredibly insane, murderous things, destroys countries, half a million men he leaves to freeze to death in Russia, and he's fine.
And then he says, one sudden irrelevant idea almost made him laugh.
Napoleon, the pyramids, Waterloo, and a wretched, skinny old woman, a porn broker with a red trunk under her bed.
It's a nice hash for this policeman to digest.
How can they digest it?
It's too inartistic.
A Napoleon creep under an old woman's bed.
Ugh, how loathsome!
And that, to me, is truly an astounding moment.
I remember reading that going, because he gets, his prose gets inside your, like, spiders being released in your bone marrow.
Like, he gives you bone shivers deep, deep in the darkness.
And this idea that Napoleon is off there conquering the world, and he's crawling around under an old woman's bed with blood all around him, trying to ratchet out her savings in a tin box.
I mean, this comparison, the artisticness of it, this artistic nature, I find a lot of people in my life When I was young in particular, paralyzed by a feeling that they could not create the image of what they wanted in the way that they wanted and that prevented them from moving forward.
They had an image of themselves as glorious and they weren't willing to do the necessary work to get there.
You know, everybody wants the Oscar.
Nobody wants to do summer stock.
And I think that...
Narcissism and belief that you should be granted what you want without having to climb the steps to get to the top floor, I think is really powerful.
And there's no sense in my mind that Napoleon would ever have thought like that, although he wanted to be like Napoleon.
Well, I think the thing that's so hard for a lot of people is that, you know, life is unfair.
And people do get, undeserving people, I do get handed opportunities and successes and it just doesn't seem fair.
I'm sympathetic to people who feel that way because there is no equality in that sense.
There is no fairness in that sense.
But the reality is that the solution to it is not going to be found in trying to create your own unfairness.
Committing evil to rectify those situations is not going to solve anything.
And it is that the section that you're describing nicely illustrates the utter absurdity of the dichotomy or of the huge gap between the way that these very vain, self-serving, self-justifying people see themselves self-serving, self-justifying people see themselves and the grubbiness of their actions.
It's kind of like if you've got some guy who is trying to groom an underage girl online, chances are pretty good that he thinks of himself as a great seducer.
And then The situation just looks absolutely ridiculous.
You've got grubby teenage couples that fancy themselves Romeo and Juliet.
The gap between who we are and how we want to view ourselves can be absurd at times.
I think Dostoevsky does an excellent job of It's illustrating the absurdity of that gap in that scene.
And it reminds me, actually, of one of the most important things I ever heard someone say to someone else.
When I was in college and a woman was talking to a grad student that was a friend of mine, and the woman said, I have all these great ideas in my head.
I just can't seem to get them out.
And the grad student very coldly said, that's just a feeling.
Those ideas don't actually exist.
You don't know that they exist until you are able to articulate them either verbally or on paper.
And that's the thing, the greatness that so many of these people feel.
It's kind of like Lena Dunham in Girls where she...
I've never seen the show, but there's an ad where she talks about, I think I might be the voice of my generation.
Well, you know, we certainly hope to God that she isn't.
But the point is that it is very common, especially for the not terribly accomplished, to feel that they have this undiscovered greatness within them.
You know, For me, it was a real shock.
Because I was always smarter than everybody else and whatnot.
But it was a real shock to encounter great writers like Umberto Eco and Joseph Schumpeter and realize that I was not in their league.
It was very humbling.
It was very good for me.
It was one of the best things, I think, that probably ever happened to me.
But that's something that the...
How you react...
To the discovery that you're not as successful as you think you should be is a key moment for any man or woman because very few of us are as successful as we would think we should be.
And so at that moment, do you think, okay, I need to try harder and I need to work harder and maybe I'll improve?
Or do you retreat into this world of delusion where you are Napoleon and everyone just doesn't realize it, even though you're crawling around under some dead old lady's bed?
It is – yeah, it is a – what's that old quote?
I think it's from – With Nail and I, oh, there comes a moment in every young man's life when he realizes he shall never play the Dane.
Can't ever play Hamlet.
And I have known people like that.
It is torture.
And the other thing, too, is, Vox, heaven forbid you get all the success that you dream of, that you imagine that you want.
That seems pretty toxic as well.
I mean, it's very easy to go and find books like Darkness Visible by William Styron.
It's very easy to go and find the essay that the woman who wrote...
The woman who wrote a movie with Julia Roberts about when she goes off on her spiritual quest and so on.
Eat, pray, love.
Eat, pray, love.
I was thinking eat, drink, man, woman.
But anyway, eat, pray, love.
And how terrible it was.
She bought this big house.
She decorated it all.
And then she kind of hated it and ended up moving to a much smaller place.
And all her friends, she gave them money to fulfill their projects, which destroyed the friendship because she felt like she was chasing after them to see if they were actually filled.
So, the success that people gain, you can end up like JK Rowling, right?
I mean...
Talking about how wonderful it is to have migrants while staying as far as humanly possible away from any effects of migrancy from the third world and so on.
So even if you get the success that you all dream of, it doesn't exactly make yourself a wonderful place.
Something Sting said about the police.
He said, you know, the best time was somewhere between the van and the private plane.
The van sucked, the private plane sucked, but right in the middle was something really cool.
And the question, and I remember this from when I was younger, in my early 20s, I played Macbeth.
And I remember sitting down with the director, who was an Iranian director, who was a fantastic guy, very, very deep.
And we spoke a lot about the play before I did it.
And I just remember saying, I have a bit of a problem that Macbeth...
Macbeth strides in at the beginning, having just hacked down 850 peasants who are probably unarmed for the sake of the king.
And everyone's like, yay, Macbeth, good job, you're a hero.
But then he stabs one king.
Who's the guy who actually ordered him to kill all of these peasants?
And that's like a terrible, terrible thing.
Why doesn't he not sleep over the peasants?
And this question between public and private crimes, to me, is very powerful.
And it's touched on at times in the book, and I remember reading it thinking, God, please, please, put the plug in the socket, make this connection, that one guy kills a porn broker, a terrible, vicious, evil crime.
But...
Great men kill by the millions and are applauded for it.
And this is the torture that occurs in the minds of the moralists, that the private crime provokes great stress and anxiety and guilt and conscience, but the public crime produces adulation and biographies and statues.
That, to me, is one of the horrifying divisions in morality that was one of its rotten centrists that caused it to collapse under the weight of the Superman and the Darwinian Well, I think that there's definitely a distinction between the public and the private act in the sense that in terms of how it weighs on the conscience.
Now, I've never been in the military, so I've never killed anyone with state sanction, but I grew up with men who did.
My grandfather was not merely a Marine.
He was called the Marine's Marine by no less than the Commandant in the Marine Corps himself.
And my uncle actually later became a Commandant.
And both of them had extensive combat experience dating back to Guadalcanal.
And one of the things that I thought was interesting about my grandfather was Was that I have never known a more cheerful man.
I've never known a man who slept better.
And one of the last things that he told our family was he asked me to read his last words at his funeral.
And one of the things that he said, and I've never known anyone who could crack up a bunch of people at his own funeral.
But he said, I just want to let everyone know how good it is to die at home surrounded by loved ones instead of a bunch of screaming Japs.
And, you know, here you've got all these people crying and stuff, and everyone just cracked up because they could all hear him saying this.
And, you know, I know for a fact that however many Japanese and Koreans and Chinese he had killed, it didn't weigh on his conscience because I think that that's part of the, you know, the sanction of the state is what takes the responsibility away from the sanction of the state is what takes the responsibility away from the Well, not just a state, but I mean, the Nazis had the sanction of the state at the time, but after Nuremberg, there was considered to be the collective guilt of the Germans and so on.
It's your peers, it's history, it's the historians, it's the moralists, it's not, I mean, the state and everyone else for all time.
Sorry, go ahead.
But you're talking about two different things.
We're talking about what actually affects the personal sense of whether it's a crime or not.
And so, you know, for example, it's not necessarily the state.
In fourth generation war, the group that is at war is not necessarily the state.
That is actually a construct.
But the important thing is whether the individual personally feels a sense of responsibility for the act.
For example, in Ender's game, when Ender commits complete xenocide and wipes out an entire race, just about We don't fault him for that because he didn't know.
He thought he was playing a computer simulation.
And so I think that it's a bit of a gradient in terms of we don't hold someone at all responsible when they have no knowledge of their own act.
If Rosalnikov had been in a drunken stupor and then committed the same act, People would have held him less responsible, and he would probably hold himself less responsible, too.
And then when you have a sanctioned act, the individual feels less responsibility.
And then when you have simply an act of private will, then that's when people tend to feel the most guilt and feel the most responsible for those things.
Now, I'm not saying...
Obviously, you can look at it from a...
A moral perspective and say, well, the act is the act.
What difference does it make?
And that's when we start getting into free will and all that sort of thing.
But I think the most important argument against the Superman idea is the fact that if you accept that reasoning, then how do you deny that Superman...
to say that two is 37 or that, you know, if the Superman has the ability to transgress certain moralities, there's no reason, there's absolutely no defense rationally, logically, against them being able to transgress there's absolutely no defense rationally, logically, against them being able to transgress anything else that can be described as a construct of
In the essay that Raskolnikov wrote, which the policeman Porfiry gets a hold of, and it's what leads him to really suspect that he's facing an ideological crime, because Raskolnikov doesn't really do much with the money he gets a hold of.
and it's an ideological crime, a test of whether he is Napoleon or not, which he fails.
And when Raskolnikov is He's talking.
He really encapsulates one paragraph that I wanted to sort of talk about.
He says to the policeman who's bringing up this article, he says, We're all, without exception, criminals.
From the very fact that making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors, and held sacred by the people.
And they did not stop short at bloodshed, either, if that bloodshed, often of innocent persons fighting bravely in the defense of ancient law, were of use to their cause.
It's remarkable, in fact, that the majority, indeed, of these benefactors and leaders of humanity Carnage.
Now, I don't know in the book, and whether Dostoevsky had a plan or was writing emotionally, it doesn't particularly matter, but I don't know if it's an argument to say no one should shed blood or if he's saying no one who can't get away with it should shed blood.
Did you see what I mean?
Because he's pointing out that people shed blood in overturning existing traditions all the time and slaughter people who are nobly and bravely defending those prior traditions.
What is that?
What the hell is Dostoevsky saying?
I mean, is Shakespeare saying to Macbeth or to the audience through Macbeth, don't kill the king, or is he saying don't kill?
Is Dostoevsky saying don't kill anyone, in which case why not write a book about the evils of Napoleon?
Well, the problem is Napoleon didn't experience, I think, what he did as evil.
Complete sociopath, complete monster like Stalin.
Didn't revisit the scenes of his crimes.
He didn't seem to be bothered in particular by what he'd done.
The deaths of millions of people.
Chairman Mao with his black teeth and weird sexual practices didn't seem to be guilty.
So what's he saying?
This is the really frustrating thing I have, Fox, with moralists, is that they seem to be saying, well, if you're really morally sensitive, don't do wrong.
It's like, okay, got it.
Most morally sensitive people aren't going to do wrong.
But what about the wrong that is done by people who are completely conscienceless monsters?
How the fuck do we deal with those people?
Well, I mean, you deal with them in much the same way.
I mean, once they commit an act, you hold them accountable, and that's that.
I mean, the thing is, you're really opening up a huge...
I won't say a can of worms because I think it's actually a good and useful discussion.
But I don't think that...
First of all, I think that there is...
It's important to distinguish between the idea of thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not murder.
They're two different things.
I mean, literally in the Hebrew, they're different words.
And so I think that we have a tendency to try to draw a binary distinction that simply does not exist philosophically.
And no, I don't think that Dostoevsky is saying there is no reason to ever kill.
The Bible itself says there's a time to kill.
But the whole thou shalt not murder is very, very clear.
And certainly as someone who was a Christian, Dostoevsky would be both prone to maintaining that important distinction between kill and murder,
and that's why I think that he is clearly condemning I don't think that he would have any trouble whatsoever in condemning Napoleon as a criminal.
But that's a different story, and that's one that Tolstoy paid a little bit more attention to, to name another great writer.
And again, as an author yourself, You understand that your vision is limited.
You know, you're not going to address every issue and answer every question that your subject might raise.
Right, right.
The other bit where he talks about this...
And the reason I'm bringing this stuff up is I first tried to read the book when I was 13 and I didn't get more than, I don't know, 60 pages into it.
No killing yet, I guess I'll move on.
And then I read it straight.
Where's the crime?
Yeah, yeah.
The punishment so far is that there is no crime and I'm still reading.
But then I picked it up again.
I guess I was 20 and I read it straight through.
Overnight just didn't stop.
And then I listened to the audiobook again more recently.
Wow.
And it had a lot to do with my sort of development as a thinker, as a moralist, and I guess as a writer and an artist as well.
This question of, if you strip away the social structures...
Like, if you strip away things like the state, the army, you know, it's a question that everyone has when they're a kid, I mean, who's got any sort of sensitivity, right?
I mean, you shoot a guy in peacetime, you get a prison cell.
You shoot a guy in wartime, you get a medal.
I mean, and a pension and a ticket tape parade and so on.
And if you take away the uniforms, if you take away, like, I can't go order people justly to go.
I mean, that's, right, subordinating some sort of crime or whatever.
But if you get the particular uniform and the sanction of the whatever it is...
And so he exists in this bare world without structure, which The Origin of the Species, again, Darwin's book published a few short years before Crime and Punishment.
It takes away the rituals, right?
It is DNA dominance game.
That's all that society becomes.
And he can't see the structures.
He can't see the...
The rituals anymore.
It's just, it's a uniform.
It's a costume, not a justification.
So he's talking with a woman and she says, aren't you half expiating your crime by facing the suffering?
She cried, holding him close and kissing him.
And Raskolnikov says, crime?
What crime?
And he's furious about this because he can't see it.
He said that I killed a vile, noxious insect, an old porn-broker woman of use to no one.
Killing her was atonement for 40 sins.
She was sucking the life out of poor people.
Was that a crime?
I'm not thinking of it, and I'm not thinking of explaining it.
And why are you all rubbing it in on all sides?
A crime, a crime.
Only now I see clearly the imbecility of my cowardice, now that I have decided to face this superfluous disgrace.
It's simply because I am contemptible and have nothing in me that I have decided to, perhaps, to for my advantage, as that poor theory suggested.
And the woman says, brother, brother, sister, what are you saying?
Why you have shed blood?
And she's in despair, because he can't see it.
And he says, she says, why have you shed blood?
He says, which all men shed.
He put in almost frantically, I'm not different than anyone.
He says, the blood which flows and has always flowed in streams, which is...
Spilt like champagne and for which men are crowned in the capital and are called afterwards benefactors of mankind.
Look into it more carefully and understand it.
I too wanted to do good to men and would have done hundreds, thousands of good deeds to make up for that one piece of stupidity.
He's talking about the murder.
Not stupidity, even.
Simply clumsiness.
For the idea was by no means so stupid as it seems now that it has failed.
Everything seems stupid when it fails.
By that stupidity, I only wanted to put myself into an independent position to take the first step to obtain means.
Then everything would have been smoothed over by benefits immeasurable in comparison.
But I couldn't carry out even the first step because I am contemptible.
That's what's the matter.
And yet I won't look at it as you do.
If I had succeeded, I should have been crowned with glory.
But now I'm trapped.
And he says, but that's not so.
Not so, brother.
What are you saying?
He says, ah, it's not picturesque, not aesthetically attractive.
I fail to understand why bombarding people by regular siege is more honorable, right?
Having a war.
They have a war to take resources.
I killed a pawnbroker to take resources.
What the fuck is the difference?
He says, the fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.
I've never, never recognized this more clearly than now, and I am further than ever from seeing that what I did was a crime.
I've never, never been stronger and more convinced than now.
He can't see past the rituals.
He can't see past the structure.
He can't see the moral universe, the moral landscape.
It's just if you're stronger and you can take it, then take it.
That's what kings do.
That's what generals do.
That's what robber barons do.
That's what...
Captains of industry do when they tweak the state to get beneficial legislation.
That's what the state does when it takes money from you by force.
Why can't I do it too?
It's a great question.
I'm not saying people should.
You understand?
It is when you don't see the...
When you look past and everything becomes the bare gun and the bare animal and the bare dominance and the bare resource transfer, why is it allowed to some...
Who seem to have no conscience about it?
And why is it denied to others who have this intellectual belief that it should be possible and noble for them?
But they can't bring themselves to do it emotionally.
It's a great question.
I think that the answer is to be found in his reasoning.
For all that he was trying to dress it up, I would take those resources and do great things with it.
But Really, it was just about his immediate needs.
Even when he did do it, he did not take sufficient resources.
He killed her, but he didn't take all the money.
What little he did take, he didn't really use.
He did nothing great.
He helped out the drunkard's family.
So even by his own metric, he failed.
It is one's genuine, true motivation that ultimately determines the morality of the act, because we know that the same act can be moral or immoral.
And we also know that simply throwing all morality out the window doesn't work.
It doesn't function for society.
Individuals cannot function without it.
Even if you believe that morality is nothing but a construct, it is a societal construct, it is a necessary construct if you want to have society.
My argument for a number of different things, including Societal morality is I like indoor plumbing.
I'm willing to accept all kinds of whatever philosophical contortions we have to go through to make sure that we have indoor plumbing.
I'm down with that.
If that makes me shallow or whatever, that's fine, but I don't want to live in sewage.
And that is ultimately the end result of Of rejecting these various constructs that Roselnikov cannot see.
And so, just because we can't see something, we can't see x-rays either, but it doesn't mean they're not real.
That, to me, is one of the great frustrations that I have about the 19th century, which makes me sound very Oscar Wilde-y.
But nonetheless, it's a very, very important thing.
Oh, yes, one of the great frustrations I have.
I'm so bitter about 200 years ago.
No, but seriously, I mean, it's kind of tough, right?
I mean, I did a podcast many years ago where it's like, yeah, it'd be great if the Second World War never happened, but then I never would have been born.
Anyway, so...
A true loss to the world.
I'm sure we're all glad that it worked out.
40 million dead, me.
Okay, fair enough, right?
It's not much of a comparison.
But here's the thing.
When...
The will to power emerged, which had always been there.
It was the will to power combined, like more secular non-aristocrats began to gain power.
And the argument, of course, has been used throughout history.
And I have a newfound respect for religious morality that's developed over the last year or two, so take that in context of this part.
But the old argument was God's on the side of the winner, right?
So if Napoleon wins and becomes Emperor of France, it's clearly because he has a divine power behind him, and therefore what he does is sanctioned by God.
And so there was a way of explaining the will to power, not the will of an individual human being, right?
The bare-forked animal, the biological reproduction machine that seeks resources and dominance and sexuality and reproduction, the Genghis Khan seed sprayer of evolution.
It was sanctioned by the divine, and therefore there was a moral element to it.
It was for the betterment of the world, the moving forward of the world spirit, whatever you want to call it.
But...
When you have these adventurers, right, from Napoleon to Hitler to all of the people that were mentioned in Raskolnikov's essay and so on, when you have this will to power combined with the emptying out of divine improvement that came about partly as a result of rationalism and scientism and Darwinianism and so on, then you have a problem.
And the problem is the will to power is now biological, not moral.
And this is what is going on here.
And this, you know, we'll get to the welfare state in a sec, which I think you can make an argument is sort of buried into this kind of stuff as well.
So to me, when the divine justifications for the pyramid of power within society fell away, Thank you.
Which I think, arguably, they did.
I mean, in the 19th century, there was strong atheism, and there was arguments that were made that mankind's in danger of being laughed out of religion and so on.
So, okay, that fell away.
Then surely the alarm bell should have gone off in everyone's mind and said, ooh, shit.
We just lost a central support of what the hell makes society, society.
It just, poof!
It just fell away, you know?
Like the load-bearing wall, there's a big giant crack on it and it's creaking and everything.
Then surely everyone should have rushed and said, okay, man, we have better figure out what the hell objective ethics means if Darwinism is valid as a fact.
And I am forever pissed, and will go to my grave pissed, that moralists did not do that.
They turned to bullshit like pragmatism, consequentialism, they turned to the, you know, sort of...
Hobbesian will to power and Humean skepticism.
I know that that was earlier and so on, but they just turned to bullshit like the greatest good for the greatest number.
Yeah, you want to get your fucking philosophy from a Vulcan, but they just said, okay, let's just do this consequentialism.
What's going to make the most people the most happy?
Let's do some bullshit calculus about that.
That's all relativism because happiness is subjective and who knows who the hell can achieve it on any consistent basis for any group except for the experience.
It destroyed universalism.
And the fact that philosophers did not work their goddamn asses off to try and resurrect some kind of universalism in the absence of divine sanction of secular power, to me was one of the great tragedies that literally led to the deaths of hundreds and hundreds of millions of people, which we're still struggling with today.
As you were talking earlier, thinking about, well, you can then, everything becomes relative.
Now, in the U.S., there are sororities who are facing big problems because men want to join them.
And that's the rational outcome.
It is, except if you can work on universalism.
So I've been busting my butt for years working on universalism.
I've got a whole book on universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, where I'm trying to put that support back up in society.
Let's say that we are post-Christian ethics.
I don't know if we can go back.
I love a lot of the Christian ethics.
I'm down with a good chunk of the Ten Commandments.
But this is the only job we have right now, which is to try and find a way to get universalism back.
Philosophically speaking, I don't know if we can go back or what's going to happen there.
I mean, some people say go back to Christianity.
I've had guests on saying go back to the ancient Norse gods.
I don't know how practical a plan that is.
Loki's been fairly low-key for quite a while, so there's not even a question in that.
I just wanted to get your thoughts on that rant.
Well, the first thing that is that I am amused by the folks that want to go back to paganism, especially like Norse paganism, because If you've actually read the history of the Vikings and you know a little bit about what that religion entailed, you would want to stay very, very, very far away from it.
Although I have to say, any religion where the funeral rites include gang rape, It's probably going to be popular with some people.
Do you know, given that my ancestry is half Irish, just every time we hear the word Vikings, it's like, what?
Where?
What?
Hit him with a rock!
Run!
Hide!
Bury yourself!
Okay, sorry, go ahead.
But, I mean, you know, this is the inevitable problem.
When I wrote my book, The Irrational Atheist, some people who hadn't read it reacted very badly to it because they thought that I was saying that atheism is irrational.
And I had to correct them and say, no, I'm saying precisely the opposite.
I like irrational atheists because they're moral parasites.
They're the ones who cling to the moral inertia of post-Christianity.
I said the ones who scare me are the rational atheists because they're the ones who quite rationally take that lack of universalism that you talk about and take it to some very dark places as well as some very silly places as we're increasing.
We've seen the dark places in the 20th century and thus far we're seeing the very, very silly places in the 21st century.
In terms of your desire to create some sort of universalist Post-Christian ethics.
My first thought is I salute you in those efforts.
If you could just stay with your first thought, I'm sure the rest of this conversation would go swimming before me so well.
I'm afraid we're running out of time.
Let's not get to a second.
No, go ahead.
No, I mean, honestly, I think it's a fascinating exercise.
And I suspect that it is ultimately a doomed one.
Because I think that you ultimately need an objective outside boundary being applied, even if there is no outside.
People have to accept that it is non-subjective.
I would actually, given how humans are, I think that humans actually would have to accept that it is imposed upon them by an outside force.
So aliens might work.
You don't necessarily...
Actually, seriously, if you're working on universalism, I would suggest that you remove the emotional content by positing a morality imposed by alien conquerors rather than Opening up everybody's angst over their bad relationship with their father when they were five years old, which tends to crop in whenever you start talking about a universal daddy.
Which, by the way, is a great song by Alphaville.
They're forever young guys, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's hilarious because they're German.
And the same way that they say und in forever young...
For some reason, nobody ever told them that you say A-universal, so everything is N-universal.
I just find it amusing.
Not a big deal.
Totally trivial tangent there.
But the point is that if you're trying to erect this universal objective morality that can be applied to everyone, you're going to end up with something that is going to look very much like These traditional religious moralities and because you are a civilized son of Christendom,
the chances are very good that you're going to end up with something that looks very much like Christian morality as colored by its pragmatic contact with the real world.
There's a reason why Augustine wrote about I think it's a worthy endeavor for a high-level intellect like yourself.
Yeah.
I just have to tell you that I know you write a lot of sci-fi and so on.
Space farmers are still not an argument.
But the problem is that I have – and this has been my big heartbreak with regards to the atheist community.
It sounds like we're not talking about Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, but we kind of are, which is – I remember this is way back in the day when I had – when I sort of mentioned to a bunch of atheists that – this is on a message board or some sort of Usenet thing or whatever – I mentioned a bunch of atheists just in passing.
Well, of course the state doesn't exist, right?
What came firing back to me was pictures of the Capitol and pictures of the Pentagon and so on.
It's like, well, the buildings exist.
I'll grant you that.
But that doesn't mean that the concept exists in the world.
That's like saying God exists because I showed you a picture of a church, right?
I mean, so this relentless avoidance of universalism that seems to be in...
Atheist communities, and I'm plowing my way through the moral landscape by Sam Harris, which is very well written, and I appreciate that he likes universalism as an abstract, but I'm still waiting for the proof of it.
Anyway, sort of early days in the book, but...
The atheists as a whole, I thought that they would be like, oh, thank God, so to speak, you've come up with something, a really strong proof of universal ethics.
But the problem is that because atheists tend to flock towards God, any universalist ethics like Christianity or what I work on that delegitimizes certain aspects of state power seems to be like...
Silver bullets into the hides of the werewolf skin of atheists.
It's like sunlight to a vampire.
It's like, well, we like your universalism because, you know, ethics are a good thing to have.
But man, if it interferes with the power of the state, I'm afraid we're just going to have to...
Step one side or the other because you kind of come across...
Because religion, Christianity in particular, does limit the power of the state for reasons that we've talked about before.
And so for me, when atheists had to choose between universal ethics and the power of the state, they seemed, almost universally, to flock towards the power of the state and away from universalism.
So the idea to me of secular ethics has to some degree been left in the dust and in the emergency that is currently facing Western civilization.
Everybody who's keen on limiting the size and power of the state, and by that I'm talking in particular the welfare state, which is, I think, the real fundamental undoing of Western civilization, as it has been before with the Roman Empire and other places, that to me is where the Boone companions lie, not in the atheist community, that to me is where the Boone companions lie, not in the atheist community, which is still flocking towards whatever they can do to boost the size and power of the state, which means that atheism is creating a giant farm of useful idiots to
It's not a rational, consistent ideology that I found in general whatsoever.
And the last thing – well, there's two other things I wanted to mention.
First of all, and this – I don't – I sort of – Before we got into the conversation, I sort of looked myself sternly in the mirror and said, are you trying to jam one of your sort of, quote, pet peeves into a novel, which obviously the novel is multidimensional enough to take, but I wanted to make sure that it was fair.
But there is a communist principle to me in the basis of this approach.
This is sort of will to power and so on.
And the principle is from each according to their ability to each according to their need.
Now...
There is need on the part of Raskolnikov.
That they have nothing to eat.
There are children who are starving.
And so the mother is the one who convinces this sensitive and shy young girl to go out and become a prostitute.
So he could conceivably do far better good with the money than the hoarding, greasy-haired old vile spider insect, horrible porn broker woman and so on.
And so this idea that the transfer, which he makes this case repeatedly, he says, it is better for me to have the money and do good than for this woman to hoard it and prey upon the poor.
It is unjust for her to have this money because I can do more good with the money.
I can make a better world out of the resources that she currently has.
And this, to me, is one of the fundamental foundations.
Let me repeat myself three more times with fundamental foundations.
But this is one of the basis of the welfare state, that the state should, through coercion, take money.
From people they feel are not using it to maximize social happiness and then redistribute it in a way that maximizes social happiness.
Or healthcare with Obamacare or socialized medicine or education through the state or whatever you want to call it.
There's this idea that need, aesthetic preference, moral arguments, maximum happiness surmount and overcome basic principles of private property.
Now, this was not...
A complex argument throughout most of human history, right?
I mean, as people have pointed out before, Sweden existed for 800 years with no welfare state.
It had charity in the form of religiosity and kindness, which, of course, was the real kindness because it was both voluntary and effective.
And then you get the welfare state.
And then the welfare state is a giant magnet for third-world migrants and with the whole argument I've made before.
But this idea that resources within society can be coercively manipulated and redistributed to maximize happiness within society, I see this occurring very powerfully deep in this novel.
And Christianity, of course, opposed that fundamental idea because once you make something coercive, it can no longer have any moral content.
And so the state forcing you to give to the poor strips free will from both parties, from the rich and the poor or the middle class.
And it strips, because it strips free will, it strips the ethics of it.
You may end up putting food in the values of the poor, but you end up stripping people of the path to heaven because they don't get to voluntarily assign their resources based on kindness and Christian charity to themselves.
So this idea that we should use coercion to redistribute resources to maximize happiness, which has been the great curse of the post-19th century era.
Civilization in the West started off in education and spread to everywhere else, as these things tend to do, to me is buried deep inside this.
And he makes a very strong case for the redistribution of resources.
It's the old thing, like if you just overcome the actual killing part, which is the coercion, but of course, you know, people get locked up for not paying their taxes, and then they get raped or killed in prison.
Like the redistribution of income comes at an enormously heavy price.
And sometimes that price is in blood running down the floor and washing away in the water of a prison shower.
I mean, it is a violent coercive action to redistribute resources to that degree.
And I think that the essence of it does exist in this.
And I did a podcast recently, which is, you know, by the by, just atheists have a much more difficult time looking at human suffering than Christians do, because for Christians, the suffering is part and parcel of the whole deal.
And suffering has a very positive element to it.
And of course, in Dostoevsky's novel, the fact that he refuses to suffer, that he continues to justify what he did, that he actually condemns himself for not being noble or strong enough to flourish from murdering someone, which is complete opposite perspective that a Christian The fact that he avoids suffering is so foundational to why he is such a bad person in the book.
And the welfare state can't stand.
The atheists can't stand to look at suffering.
But Christians embrace it as part of the human condition and a necessary path of purification.
And I think his sensitivity, I can't suffer myself.
My sister can't suffer.
So I'm going to do whatever it takes to end this suffering.
And this woman's suffering will be ending when she's died anyway.
So I think that this addiction to coercion to fix problems of poverty or Shortage of resources for certain groups, I think is kind of embedded in there, and it seems to have erupted in the 19th century with the fall of Christian ethics.
Well, I think that Dostoevsky actually makes a very prescient point with the outcome, because the argument is, as you say, but the response that Dostoevsky has to it is actually...
It has a perfect analog to the real world, which is it doesn't work.
He can make this argument all he wants, but the reality is that after he commits the act and can justify it, he then fails his part of the bargain.
That's exactly what happens with the welfare state.
The welfare state does not increase net happiness.
The welfare state impoverishes everyone.
The welfare state actually, in some cases, if you tie it to immigration and so forth, the welfare state not only reduces societal happiness, it puts the existence of society itself at risk.
I mean, you don't need to convince me of the coercive aspect of it.
My father is in prison for 46 more months over U.S. tax stuff.
But here's the important thing about suffering, is that Yes, suffering is something that we don't want to experience, but it is always true that there is some sort of silver lining.
It was interesting to me that my father told me that he was more respected and treated better in prison than he ever had been as the wealthy CEO of a technology company.
I mean, that was kind of remarkable, but what he's spent his time doing is he gets wrongly convicted prisoners out of prison.
I think the last time he had added it up, he had helped people get out of 1,100 years cumulative of prison that they were already in prison for going to serve on the basis of bad convictions and that sort of thing.
Did he ruin his life by going to prison?
I think it's hard to make that case.
Despite the fact that you or I, looking at it ahead of time, would have said, oh, what a terrible thing.
What a horrible mistake.
This is just going to be pure suffering.
No good can possibly come of it.
And yet, I'm not sure.
I'm sure my father would decide to do things very differently if possible.
But I don't think that he would think for a second.
He would think that even he would say that no good has come of it.
Even from a non-Christian perspective.
Now, I personally would like to avoid as much suffering, physical and emotional, as anyone else.
But it is helpful, I think, To understand that sometimes the cost of avoiding suffering can actually be worse.
Right.
Well, I think that is definitely true.
And certainly in any clash between cultures, those more willing to embrace suffering will win.
I think almost without a doubt.
So the last thing I wanted to mention, and this is a...
A very, very short quote from the book when Raskolnikov is talking about why he did what he did, or what his thoughts are about killing.
He says,"'The old woman was a mistake, perhaps, but she's not the point.
The old woman was merely a sickness.
I was in a hurry to step over.
It wasn't a human being I killed.
It was a principal.
So I killed the principal, but I didn't step over.
I stayed on this side.' All I managed to do was kill, and I didn't even manage that.
As it turned out.
And again, a lot of what Dostoevsky writes as Raskolnikov's words and his thoughts is very confused.
And I don't know if that had to do with censorship or how close artists can get to really, really explosive issues.
But this idea that you can create a category of people and then kill everyone in that category without killing people because you're just destroying the principle, to me, was one of the fundamental underpinnings of...
There's totalitarianism in the 20th century, and I guess even now.
So you have categories wherein you can dismiss the content of people in those categories.
You know, you will see this Marine Le Pen, extreme right-wing, because no one's ever described as extreme left-wing, even though they're far more extreme than anyone on the right, because they're out there in black clothing beating people up and so on.
But you can create a category, a basket of deplorables, or...
Much more aggressively in Soviet times, counter-revolutionary forces.
You've got this category, counter-revolutionary forces.
Whoever is in that category, or Kulak, rich peasant, or bourgeois, and you can just put people in this category.
Once they're in that category, they're dehumanized, they're your enemy, they're predator and your prey, or vice versa.
You can do anything you want to people in that category.
And this, to me, is one of the great, terrifying things that's happening in the West at the moment, is the emergence of these categories.
Now, Christianity...
I don't think falls into this particular problem at all.
Because, of course, there are non-believers in Christianity, but they're just, you know, that old thing.
There are no strangers.
There are only friends I haven't met yet.
Well, there are no non-Christians.
There are just converts I haven't met yet.
And this idea that you can't put people into categories because of the individuation of the soul and the universe within the soul that yearns to reach heaven and to achieve a oneness with God and so on.
There aren't particular categories, but in the Darwinian world...
It's so easy, and I don't know exactly why.
Maybe I'm making no sense at all, but it seems so very, very easy, Vox.
For people to create, and this is obsession on the left with the other, the other who you can dehumanize.
And it's like, well, of course there is, because all you people do is create these categories which you can then dehumanize and call in the airstrikes of either social opprobrium or literal physical destruction or incarceration or putting them in camps or whatever.
You're a counter-revolutionary.
You're a disturbing force in society.
And therefore, I can do anything I want to you and consider myself justified.
This creation of categories, right?
He says here...
It wasn't a human being I killed.
It was a principle.
That principle being exploitation or lack of social utility or being in the category of insects, this dehumanization that occurs of enemies.
I don't know what it is, but since the fall of Christianity or since the step back of Christianity in a lot of the West, less so in America, there has been this...
Growing addiction to creating these categories of dehumanization wherein, you know, you can punch so-and-so because he's a Nazi and you can call someone a Nazi and then it's, well, you've got this category.
And once you have this category, everyone in it is fair game.
And that, to me, not only is it not an argument, but it's a very, very slippery slope.
Well, I think it's a fatal slope for the left.
I mean...
I don't know if you saw the pictures from the Huntington Beach rally, but the Trump supporters were making mincemeat of the black bloc folks.
I think it's a very dangerous game to play this othering where there's no possibility of transformation.
I think that That's why, for example, Franco was always so vilified, was because he was contra-revolutionary, and worst of all, he was a successful contra-revolutionary.
Nothing frightens them like Franco and Pinochet.
I think that the left and that totalitarian mentality that you described has a fatal weakness in it.
Not just a practical weakness, not just the many philosophical and logical weaknesses.
But the practical weakness is never leave a rat without an escape route.
Because if you're going to corner a rat, a person, a people, they're going to fight back.
And I think that is the fundamental error of the left.
Once you've been othered, there's no reason for you to do anything but fight.
And once they declare no quarter, there's no reason for you to spare them.
And I think that it's a tragic thing.
It's a foolish thing.
And yet, what choice do we have once they've said there's no place for you in our society?
The only possible response that we can have is you can't run, you can't hide, you get helicopter ride.
We can't negotiate with them because they have declared that we are deplorably non-negotiables.
What we're seeing is literally a breakdown of civilization.
Right.
Well, that's why I've been working so hard on this book, which I still think that there may be a chance to win through words.
And when I give that up, I'll step aside and observe with horror what comes next.
So, I just wanted to remind people about Vox's very fascinating and great work.
We'll put links to all of his stuff below.
You really, really want to check out Social Justice Warriors, Always Lie, Taking Down the Thought Police, and Conservative, How Conservatives Betrayed America, and his collected columns.
Here we go.
His collected columns, now with hair.
Innocence and Intellects, 2001 to 2005.
Well worth your time to peruse.
Thanks a lot for a great chat.
Please, everyone...
Get a hold of Crime and Punishment.
You can find it on EPUB. It's available.
It's, of course, public domain now and all that.
You can find it in text.
There's a great version of it on Audible in audiobook format.
Go get it.
Listen to it.
Read it.
Think about it.
Absorb it.
It's powerful stuff.
It's important stuff.
I hate to say it's more relevant now than ever because it sounds like a cliche, but hey, it's more relevant now than ever.
I'm still going to stick by that.
And don't forget to check out Vox Populi and Alpha Game Vox's blogs.
