That predicted, in particular predicted what was going to happen in the going century. I'm going to read you something that he wrote. Try to tell you today why the events in the century happens so the mass genocidal movements in particular, which were probably the defining characteristic of the century and then also

what that has to do with individual psychology. My first degree was in political science and I was interested in political science because I was interested fundamentally in the reason that human societies went to war and when I was studying political science, which is quite a long time ago, the fundamental theory that underlie plague scientists, explanations for conflict reckon on EC people, fight over resources and that never seemed reasonable to me because, first of all, obviously many wars are fought for other reasons then resources to central american countries think it was Guatemala, Honduras? If I remember actually went to war over a soccer game. So the outcome of the disputed, the disputed outcome of a soccer game, and even if you do think that the reason that people groups of people engage in conflict,

or for economic reasons, doesn't exactly explained much, because that doesnt explain whether they are fighting for because of absolute differences in wealth or be because of relative discrepancies and wealth, and those are very, very different causal elements. And then, even if people do fight for economic reasons, which means they're fighting for things that they value, it isn't exactly clear why people value what they value, because different societies value different things so economics in the final analysis ends being a shallow explanation, and I pursued economic, political and sociological explanations for social conflict for a long time, but eventually they became tenable to me and that's partly, why wouldn't studied clinical psychology? Because it struck me that the right level of analysis for understanding mass movements like the Nazi movement or other or they, the ideological possession,

the characterize, the stalinist Soviets or a Maoist Communists or or or POL pot's cambodian communists, or any of the dictators that you can talk about. Who were on the far left or the far right during twentieth century. To me, those were failings of individual personality and the most astute writers that I've ever read, who described what they assumed to be. The causes of these terrible conflict made the same point, which is why I'm having you read, Viktor Frankl. How exactly soldier nets and social rights and is not generally regard as a personality psychologist, but he of all the people I ve ever read he's the one who lays out the connection between the existential failure of the individual and the mass catastrophes of society and, to me, that's too important a link to overlook in it. It also strikes me that it's the primary lesson of the twentieth century mean what

One lesson, for example, is beware of ideologies and The reason I'm gonna, walk you through nature in a bit of guard today is because these people, in the late tenth century with their antennas up knew that the collapse one way of looking at is the collapse of tradition, the western values that's one way of looking at what set up the preconditions for the peoples: humanity susceptibility to ideologies in the twentieth centuries in the twentieth century, The way of looking at it in some sense is that, as the world came, together in the nineteenth century, and ideas were passed around from coal the culture more rapidly than they had ever been passed around every culture suffer d, culture Nation, in some sense, because if I believe something You believe something and there's a long history behind both of Police, when we come into contact with it, will either

and I'll try to destroy you or, if I don't. If I take you seriously and you take me seriously, then that's going to leave us both wondering exactly what's: what's rock solid underneath this? That's what needs you comments in this particular quote of what is great. One either must be silent or speak with greatness, with greatness. That means cynically and with innocent. What I relate is the hit three of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming. What can no longer come differently the admin, of nihilism. Nihilism is the belief in nothing. Or the belief that things have no meaning our whole. Europe culture is moving for some time now, with a tortured tension that growing from decade to decade as towards a catastrophe, restlessly violently and headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end that no law

reflect reflex, it is afraid to reflect. Neither speaks here has conversely done nothing so far, but to reflect as a fellow philosopher and solitary by instinct, who is found his advantage in standing aside outside Why has the event advent of nihilism, come necessary because the years. We have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence. Because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals, because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value values really had we require. Some time, new values. Now Wisdom stands at the door whence come This uncanny first of all guests, point of departure. It's an error to consider social distress or physiological digit.

Duration or corruption of all things as the cause of nihilism, ours is the most honest and compassionate age, so nature, disappearances, right away with sociological explanations, for people's lack of belief in meaning in life, no been what of what your taught in universities is. Is sociological in its causal thinking that the causal path is often it's the social conditions that people find themselves in that determine their response to the world. But nature stands violently against that perspective, and this is a hundred and fifty years ago, even before. In some sense it was thoroughly well developed and the reasoning stands against. It is because he points out that Wherever your position in society, your position can be made subject any number of individually Reputations, its its meaning, like me

of being poor, say or the meaning of being comparatively poor isn't a meaning, that's etched in stone, and so it has to be interpreted psychologically before it can become a causal factor and if it can be interpreted psychologically, then it's not a fact. Like the existence of a mountain is a fact: it's still an interpretation He says distress itself, whether psychic psychological The color intellectual also need not produce nihilism, so we also region suffering itself as a cause of nihilism, need not at all pretty is that is the radical rejection of value, meaning and desirability. Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Rather, it is in one particular interpretation, the Christian Moral One that nihilism is routed. The end of Christianity at the hands of its own morality, which cannot be replaced, which turns against the Christian God the sense of

Fruitfulness highly developed by Christianity is nauseated by the false and mendacious ness of all christian interpretations of the world and of history to rebound from God is the truth the fanatical faith. All is false and active Buddhism. So it's a strange interpretation because Nietzsche, although he was violently and Christian and is it is it is. What is self presentation to the public was more like, in my opinion, was more like a beneficial critic of the of the western christian tradition and because the first thing he realized Was that the domination of the west, by essentially by the Catholic Church, for something like nineteen hundred years was necessary in order for four european mind to become trained and focused. So his point was that you, and unless you learn to place an interpretive scheme on the world and interpret that world

a coherent manner through that scheme, you don't have a in mine and end for need, in some sense. It didn't really matter what the internal if scheme was, it was just that at some point you had to do plan yourself this would be something like a post adolescent process. You had to discipline yourself by, developing an inherent to some sort of coherent, deep, coherent view, and the consequence of that, at least in principle, could be that you would be this. You can come to be the sort of person that would that would be respectful of the truth and also someone who is it regarded truth as a moral virtue as a higher order, more virtue. But then niche's point was that Christianity developed that sense in Europe to such a degree that the spirit of truths, went after the axioms of Christianity and demolish them. That was his view What happened during the alike meant, as a consequence of the interaction between

science and religion. So natures view was that. The modern mind will say because we're speaking one hundred and fifty years later, the modern mind had been trained, vigorously to interpret things through a coherent structure and then once that training had occurred, then it could use number of coherent structures, and then it could also use its its ability to former relationship with the truth to criticize the very thing that gave rise to that might and now and now it's Nietzsche's diagnosis of the twentieth century. Individual pursuit of truth itself had undermine the structure that gave birth to the pursuit of truth and that let people wide open and left them wide open. On the one hand, to nihilism an nihilism is the belief that nothing has meaning nothing has The final meeting and the best way of expressing nihilism is what the hell differences are going to make it in a thousand years. What we do today or in a hundred years for that matter.

And it's a red, its irrational reduction of all of all of the experiences of life to two to rational in significance. Nothing has any final meaning and saw the question. Of course it emerges from that is why do anything at a deeper question that emerges for that from? That is why they are suffering, and but that's not the only problem from an existential point of view, because the existentialist and an each as well also believed that nihilism, was actually unbearable, because people suffer they have to have a framework of meaning in which to place suffering, because otherwise it undermines their ability live and then an and people can't move forward in that condition, and so another one of Nietzsche's per Prognosticate. Was that nihilism would produce its counterpart, which was totalitarianism and people would leap from. There emerged, and saying in in

in evolution, airily, emergent systems of faith and jump, Headlong into rational utopian comes, actions of reality because you because people can't do without an interpretive framework, so it wasn't as if the consequence of mood beyond religion was going to be a step into movement, which is what materialist, Rationalists, always presume that presume, if you could just shed the superstitious claptrap, that's associated with your religious heritage. You'd instantly be enlightened, but need just point That is not what likely to happen. What's likely to happen is two things. People will either give up on life completely and become cynical but surely cynical, which is certainly a disease of of young people, Maybe it's always been disease of young people, but it certainly been a disease of young people since say the end of world war two, so they

nihilistic and not believe that anything has any meaning that undermines their ability to strive, or they fall prey to some sort of rigid ideology and needs also understood that if people fail prey to a religion to a rigid ideology or several rigid ideologies that the only plausible outcome of that would be like, exceptionally intense warfare and, of course, that's exactly what happened in the century now. Nice also says this can't be first. Scepticism regarding morality is what is decisive the and of the moral interpretation of the world. Which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into some beyond leads to nihilism. All meaning many says, on ten ability of one interpretation of the world upon which a tremendous amount of energy has been lavished awakens. This is

in that all interpretations of the world are false. So it's a broom. Observation because his point is I've seen this in fundamentalist Christians, for example, who who I've taught in the past, because I have a very biological view of things and the people. I met more of them when I was in the United States. They were more intelligent than. Then they were wise, meaning the consumer within which there intellect was forced to operate, which would be the christian fundamentalist constraints. We're not sophisticated enough to encapsulate there, collect. They were too smart for their own theories, so they come to university and and and be expelled. Two ideas that we're outside the scope say of christian fundamentalism would just blow their fundamentalist presuppositions into bits, and so then, of course they fall into nothing but nature says, it's even worse than that. It's not only that you fall into nothing. It's that one

one of your systems of belief has been destroyed. You also learned that systems of beliefs themselves are unreliable, and so you can't just move easily from one to another, because it's like well you're in a boat it sunk, and now you know that if you jumped to the next boat, that boat could also sake. So it's it's not only that Europe has sunk it's now. You know that all boats can sink and sort of that's part of the position the modern person as far as nature was concerned, is that everyone knows, at least in principle, that all the boats that we want to jump into could potentially Think and so nature saw now long as the inevitable com consequence the inevitable rational com points of that realisation. Now I told you guys before it was a very, very influential personally influenced and influenced Heidegger and Heidegger influence being swagger and boss, but nature also influenced young, as

just Freud did and Young spent his whole career, trying to solve the question that needs supposed. One of the questions was. Because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these values really happy. So the collapse of a belief system makes all the values within it longer tenable that that's the meaning of niches statement that God is dead. He said, if you take the central out of system of belief you can't hold on to all the things that were derived from that axiom. So an example is this so, for example, in modern western law. There's a presupposition and the presupposition is that some weird. Since everyone is equal before the law and that's predicated the idea that not even the place too someone who's, a murderer or your murderer, and it's known, you have to be treated with respect. You know you have to be treated with respect by the legal system and that's a very, very strange. It's a miracle that that something

that ever emerged because it so what unlikely. So then you might ask well what is the idea that everyone has worth before the law grounded in? Where does that They come from. It comes from the idea of natural rights that we have natural rights, and then you might ass well, where The idea of natural rights come from while men, yours, and you're starting to move beyond the realm of national philosophy, because natural rights the idea of natural rights has been something has been an idea, That's been emerging for thousands and thousands of years, it's ground in Christianity, at least two in the in the map, its grounded in Christianity, to the degree that one of the things that distinguishes Christianity is the idea that there is a universal faith and that everyone, whether there in that faith or not, has intrinsic value: so natural rights are grounded in the idea of the intrinsic value of the soul, and then that's founded in the idea that

business itself, participates in creation and say that's an idea, that's embedded in Genesis and also in most creation stories. So when you get rid of the religious underpinnings which which ground. The entire system in a kind of dream, like mythology, when you get rid of that there's no reason that, what's left over rash, we can survive and went. You can see that if you look at what happened in the twentieth century, because there were at least two, major challenges to the To the civilizations that involved, they weren't only christian or jewish to save civilizations. The same thing happened in China: there there was a placement of these evolve. Moral systems that emerged over a tremendous amount of time that no one rationally created once people started to criticise them and to destroy the axioms on which they were built and move them aside. Then there was a gaping

hole left and the whole was filled well. It was filled, most particular either by nazi fascism, which you know spread like mad throughout Central Europe or by communism, which still possess is China so. I believe no China came from from a from a historical culture that was substantially different from say that of Western Europe once once rip once Now the emerged to the point: where could be used as a critical force which happened in Europe that spread like mad in it? It undermined the societies of China, just like it, mind, the societies of the West Mean rush. You can read. You can read this if you read Tolstoy, for example, Tolstoy confessions, rust, It was really the last country that underwent the transformations that were associated with the enlightenment. So when The story was: a young person in the late nineteenth century a little. He said he could literally remember when they are now

my spread through his school that God was dead now the year the West Europeans have been working on that idea for a couple of hundred years. You know, with the dawn of the dawn of scientific thinking, but the Russians were very backwards in some sense and they never they'd. Never, they were never affected the conflict between rationality in religion until it happened all at once. It happened all at once at the end of the nineteenth century and the consequence of that it's complicated, but the consequence of that with the monarchy, exploded, The consequence of that was that the Russians were left with nothing and the consequence of that was the Bolshevik Revolution, And then not was what started the entire soviet nightmare. You see. Very frequently that when a society loses its grounding so and its historical truth that it turns to something as alter

You see. The same thing happened in Quebec, because Quebec didn't undergo them and transformation until the late nineteenth fifties, it was probably the last european society to to go through the year lighten revolution, because the catholic church was an incredibly dominant force and in Catholic Quebec, back until the late Nineteenth Fifty's in the average family size during that time must have been in the neighbourhood of ten, children and then sudden in the late nineteenth fiftys, the the there's just lost their Catholicism. It was just gone and now, for example, that the chaotic- why have the lowest marriage rate in the western world and one of the lowest reproduction rates as well, and there was a Gallup poll that was conducted. I heard about this about must be ten years ago. Now I don't know if this information is ever being made public, but there was a gallop. All that indicated that if you are a Catholic who had lost your face. So you left the church your ten times,

more likely to be a separatist, so you can see that it would seem that the continent so it is that if one belief system disappears well nihilism as well possibility for another possibilities that you just adopted next thing, that's close. That gives you structure and nationalism, of course, is one of those things. So nature is diagnosed disease fundamentally and then the psychoanalysts like young in particular, they are trying to see nature believed that if God died because God died, people we're going to have to take on the responsibility that was once gods. So to speak as a personal problem So it means thus big zarathustra. Nature, said: God is dead. We kill them and will never find enough. What are the wash away the blood? But he also said in order for people to withstand that catastrophe

We'd have to become gods themselves essentially, and why You can see how that might go wrong if you think about people like Stalin and Hitler, but but the psychoanalysts also like the psychoanalysts, especially you and then Heidegger For his part, one idea seriously and the young Young said, was trying to figure out well if we lose, our historically conditioned values, we no longer believe in them if nihilism is, thou come on one hand and totalitarianism, thou on the other hand, what's left and the union idea was well revelation of the self is that the individual could not as a rational, mind, but the individual as it. Totality it's something that Rogers also believed the individuals that totality would be capable of bringing for genuine values as a consequence of of exploration and honesty. Something like that and that's associated with the existential I

of individual responsibility so that one of the upshot of of the union theory is that, to the degree, don't bear the responsibility for your own actions to the agreed. You avoid responsibility or shunk them off on to say solitary, nor ideological system. So by when you avoid responsibility for your own thought because you're the follower of an ideological system. You have avoided the sports ability of thinking for yourself and the consequence of that was continual catastrophe as those pathological, rational systems unfolded themselves. Solzhenitsyn wrote the gulag archipelago in it in in the early nineteen seventy, and there were two things that made that book very, Striking one was the story,

that he told we're so unbelievably powerful that you couldn't read them and not believe it was true, and that was even the case. If you were a devoted marxist and at that time in the EU, our cities, and in many ways it hasn't changed that much. These into the westward dominated by marxists and end some degree that was ethically inexcusable because people had known since the nineteen fifty is especially since George Orwell wrote people known since the nineteenth fifties that the steel industry, was murderous beyond belief, stolen, for example, six million Ukrainians in the nineteen thirties. He starved them to death because all of the farmers have been collectivized at that point, and what TAT meant was all the good farmers had been killed and all the resent, Farmers had been given the land, and then they collectivized the farms, and then Stelhan took all the food to feed the cities or to start the Ukrainians. Depending on how You look at it and the edicts we're so harsh that if you are

ukrainian and you are family and they were starving and you went into field after it had been harvested, and you picked out into jewel grains from the dirt together in a bold feed your family, if you got caught, then they would shoot you. Soldiers and observe this, and he he was very interested and how this system developed conclusion after decades of thinking, Was that the reason the russian system was able to maintain itself fundamentally was because individuals were willing to give up the responsibility of their own. Relationship to the truth, to the state and constantly lie to themselves about everything and that, if the, if the individuals that compose the state had refused to accept things that they knew full well to be true that the state would have been able to survive, and you know

sergeant its case is very strong because in some sense he was the first person who told the truth about the gulag archipelago, which was this chain of prison camps that the Soviets. Erected, on which their economy was essentially based. He was the first person who really told the truth about that, and he hit the foundations of marxist theory so hard that well partly a collapsed, and partly it went under into movements like postmodernism, so his his propositions, it's a dusty asking problem. They should actually that one person who stop lying could could over. Tyranny? It's a hard thing to believe, but there's been, of examples of that sort of thing. In the twentieth century, it happened with Gandhi, with a low Evelyn Czechoslovakia hat with Nelson Mandela happen with soldier, nor so those are pretty powerful examples of of the past

or of a single individual who refuses to accept the convention. The convent lie. Dostoevsky was writing about the same time as nature. Dostoevsky is a very interesting person. He was an orthodox christian, although is a very television, man and Dorothea nature twins in some sense. So what Nietzsche Road in philosophy Csp wrote road in literature and thus the one of Dostoevsky is primary months was that if there is no God, everything is permitted. So, what's it to take on Nietzsche's discussion of nihilism, likewise, if there's no ultimate value of any sort, then why can't you do Zactly what you want and that's a semi explores too great purpose in crime and punishment need dossier.

He's conclusion was that the reason you can't do anything you want is because you actually come equipped with an inherent set of values that are real and then, if you violate them too too great a degree you destroy your own structure as well as damaging the society that surround yet. So Dostoevsky was a big believer in some sense like unions, Roger Arians, that there are the law workers are values within a human being in the end it and then it's an actual thing. You can't disregard it without damage those two. If there was also a very powerful critic of reason, and the reason for that was, It was raised in some sense that brought down the house of cards so to speak that constituted classical face, but the count consequence of that rational destruction of values was the emergency? of nihilism, we're totalitarianism and the consequence of those two things is the inability live or the emergent emergence

the murderous state, so duties. I looked at that and thought okay. Well, perhaps bot Leave that reason itself is the proper guide to reality is wrong and so this is one of the things he wrote. It notes from underground when he was exploring. This idea notes from underground by Wade's very short, pork and it's very much worth reading it submits its Dostoevsky, wrote five books that are incalculably great and what happened to us, I I don't remember if I told you this or not, but he was a student article, and he was he was arrested by the tsars men because of a right turf or a protest that hit him. It is compatriots had come up with a sort of a bit player in it, but they put him in in prison. When he was a young man and then he was in for quite a while, and then one day they took him out into courtyard and they shot him at dawn. You know, the soldiers line up and put them by post Stan shot up, but they used blanks

he didn't know that and it scared bad. He had epileptic seizure and then he added what decisions for the rest of his life and the kind of epilepsy measures he had were associated with mystical. Experience so do for he got a seizure, would have this sense. That he was. Sperience, seeing the world in a more and more meaningful way until he was the very dawn of sort of omnipotence see and knowledge. And then you have a seizure, but it wasn't until he shot with blanks and then putting this terrible prison for a long period of time and had epilepsy that he began. with great novelist it changed, Some way his earlier, things are really there not good there. Their sterile and dry and his later writings that five great novels in particular are therein and there, in a class of their own. So does he s gate? The first thing Dostoevsky tried to come to grips with was the fact. He didn't believe that life itself was a rational,

because that's an enlightenment proposition that the structure of reality is in and of itself rational. So it can be help it can be dealt with by rational means, and that's been a very powerful theory, because it's enabled us to develop this, the scientific viewpoint and the technology that goes along with it, but rationality is not the only more human, knowing there's all sorts of other modes of human knowing and many of them. Those are associated with emotion and motivation there more viable, logically instantiated say unless computational and rationality has a very difficult time even conceptualizing, how those other modes of knowing might be real, and so what it tends to do is denigrate them, as mere opponents rationality, but the dostoevsky perspective- and this is also something that Rogers followed up one and you was that life itself- is so we rational or experience itself is so irrational, given its suffering in its and its absurdity.

That a merely rationally formulated representation. Of life is insufficient. It can't can manage the job and what rationality will there therefore do is away. Everything from life cut away, everything from its definition of reality, that it can't actually encapsulate Dostoevsky said In short, one may say anything about the history of the world. Anything that might enter the most sordid imagination, the only thing one can't say is that its rational word sticks in one's throat this is the odd thing continually happening. Their content turning up in life, moral and rational persons sages, and where's of humanity who make it their object to of all their lives, is morally and rationally as possible to be so too being a light to their neighbours simply in order to show them that it is possible,

to live morally and rationally in this world, and yet we all know that is very people sooner or later have been false to themselves. That's a pre Sir Authority and ideas playing some queer trick off A most unseemly one. Now I ask you what can be expected of man since he is being endowed with such strange qualities. Shower apart him every earthly blessing drown him in a sea of happiness so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface, give em economic prosperity So that he should have nothing else to do, but sleep eat, cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species and eat, then out of sheer and gratitude, and spite man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk is king and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish. The most Annette,

economical absurdity simply to introduce into all this positive good sense. His fatal, fantastic element. It is just as fantastic dreams is vulgar only that he will desire to retain simply in order to prove to himself as if was so necessary. That manner the men and not the keys of appeal which the laws of nature threatened to control so completely Soon we will be able to desire nothing except by the calendar and that's not all even if man really were nothing but a piano key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics. Even then, he would not become reasonable. He would do purposefully do something. People out of simple, simple ingratitude simply to gain his point and if he doesn't find means he will contrive destruction and chaos and suffering of sorts only to gain his point. He will launch a curse upon the world

and as only man can curse gets his privilege. The primary dismay function between him and other animals, maybe by curse alone, he will detain, is object. That is to convince himself that he's a man and not a piano key, and if you say that all of this two can be calculated in tabulated and chaos and darkness and curses so that the mere possibility of care Violating it all beforehand would stop at all reason would reassert itself. The man would purpose. We go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain is point I believe in it. I answer for it, for the work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute a man not a piano key, might be at the cost of his skin and might be by cannibalism. And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off and that desire still dependence. Something we don't know he was scream at me. That is, if you condescend to do so

that no one is touching. My free will that's all are concerned with, is that my free will should itself of its own free will coincide with my own normal interests and the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good heavens, gentlemen, sort of free will is laughed when you when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all the case of twice two makes for a place to makes for, without my will, as if freewill meant that that was written in the late in eighteen, lady teen, hundreds is as well and Dorothy S gate already fig now by that point, that the consequence of the new ideas swimming into Russia, and undermining orthodox Christianity, which was the say, the natural culture in some sense of Russia, was going to be either. Oil is a more totalitarianism and he examined the propositions of totalitarianism and the proposition,

of totalitarianism were essentially utopian. The idea was, except it's like a cult except this mode of being except this interpretation of the world and society will advance towards a point well say in the case of communism. Wealth is equally just repeated and everyone is free, that's a very very powerful idea. Obviously, because it attracted hunt, of millions of people each according to each according to his need from each other, Owing to his ability sounds fair. You get what you have you get. What you, need to live, venue contribute. What's in it, what's in you to contribute, and when it was laid out in the world, it was an absolute catastrophe and dostoevsky criticism this before it even happened. He said: look here beings do not want utopia, we're too insane for that. If you, we, if you had comfort sterile comforted,

You had everything you want just given to you all. You do is crazy? Just so that you wouldn't have to be borne by all that perfection, you did straw it. So the irrational element. That's inside of this dionysian element could leap out and live, and so Ever Utopia is it's not the point, solution to all of your problems. You don't even want to live without problems, Kierkegaard Writing at a little earlier on sit. But all along the similar, a similar track of ideas. Also criticising the idea of Utopia bleed at least in part to the meaning and in life- is to be found, within the struggle that constitutes life and not in the solution to that struggle which may be as equivalent to death and not to utopia.

It is about four years ago, that I got the notion of wanting to try my luck as an author, I remember it quite clear it was a Sunday. Yes, a son The afternoon I was seated as usual, outside at the cafe in the Fredericksburg Garden. I've been astute. For half a score of years? Although never lazy. Oh my seventy nevertheless was like a glittering inactivity, a kind of occupation for which I still have a good. Partiality and for which perhaps even have have a little genius read much. I spent remainder of the day idling and thinking or thinking and idling, but that was all it came to so I sat there. And I smoke my cigar until I lapsed into thought. Among other thoughts, remember these you were going on. I said to myself to become an old man without being anything and without really undertaking to do anything on other hand, wherever you look around you and litter Sure and in life you see the celebrated names and figures. The

precious and much heralded men who are coming into prominence and are much talked about the many benefits of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier. So. By railways, others by omnibus steamboats others by the telegraph, others by easily apple compendium and short recitals of everything worth knowing. And finally, the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought zero easier. More and more significant, and what are you doing here My soliloquy was interrupted because my cigarette with smoked out and a new one, to be lit, so I smoked again and Suddenly this thought flashed into my mind. You must do something: as much as with your limited capacities, it will be impossible for you to make any thing easier than it has already become. You must, with this humanitarian enthusiasm.

The others undertake to make something harder. This notion pleased me immensely The same time, it flattered me to think that I, like the rest of them, would be loved industry. By the whole community for women all combine in every way to make everything easier, There remains only one possible danger, namely that the EU will become so great that it began is altogether too great. There's only one on left, although it is not yet a felt want, when people will want difficulty, Out of love for mankind and out of despair. At my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing: and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made. A move a genuine interest in those who make everything easy? I can see that my task to create difficulties everywhere regard is often regarded as an existentialist. Now one of the ideas that runs its way through existential ism. Is the idea that too

human, is to simultaneously be saddled with an intrinsic response. Stability, a moral responsibility that you responsible, not only to yourself to your soul, say, but also to the people around you and that that isn't an hour. Mature imposition, that's imposed upon you, buy rationality or by your fellow man for that matter, but something that's right at the heart of the reality of existence itself such that, if you weren't or fall short of bearing that responsibility. You'll pay a price in guilt and in shame and is suffering. Bin, Wanger and boss, working off off hideously, said that guilt and fear our debts to possibility if you're guilty about something

Well, it's because you not upholding irresponsibility, whereas for Freud that was often of a form of pathology, excess guilt in them. Of course, an excess guilt can become pathological, but Kircher guards point is the guilt itself, isn't something to be cured, it's it's it's an integral and necessary part of reality. Just like discussed in despair. Air and fear at all the negative emotions stay alert you to your play. In the world and died towards the unfolding of your spirit, fail you're to shoulder your existential burden is what results in neurotic guilt and fear. Been swaying on boss also believed that, like existential anxiety and that's. The feeling of of nothingness is fear of loss of world the. World that you inhabit. The conceptual world that you have it inhabit can be destroyed. At any moment and that you are aware of that at some level. It's the same comment that nature made an

and nature believed that this was some. Modern people were particularly susceptible to because our rationality is always capable of sawing off the branch that we're sitting on the matter you're doing even if are engaged in a deeply the critical part of it mine can always say. While what makes you think that's a worthwhile and you know one answer could be well, it manifests itself as being worthwhile, and why should I pay attention to those rational doubts, but that's not We're train we're trained that Ross, Tonality is the thing that encompasses everything, instead of being trained. That rationality is something that's encompassed by something else, and so with doubts I'm up that a rational way really believe them, because the rational, instead of asking ourselves? Well, if the rational It is undermining. The meaning in my life, and making it difficult for me to proceed, maybe this to do is to question whether not that doubt is valid now dependent what you regard is real, because if it's free, if it's

the rational argument itself. That's real. Then you can dispense with the doubts. But if you say I'll rationality is too limited in its apprehension to deal with the absurdity of life. There other sorts of answers like music for example, or or art or or kind of engagement that you that you experience when you're Involved in something that you're incredibly interested in those are for of reality that are that you can. Regard those as forms of reality that transcend rationalism, instead of being something bet it inside rationalism that can be destroyed by doubt and the problem with that is that it can undermine you completely. That's nice but even worse than that it can lay. You opened the idiot, logical possession and that's that's, say tanning in its in its in its catastrophe or I'll talk to you a little bit

now about the concentration camp, concentration camps were established there, there is published in England, Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia and Yugoslavia and in the Soviet Union. The estimates these arrests that were derived by soldier nets and where that sixty six million people died in internal repression the Soviet Union between one thousand nine hundred and nineteen and one thousand nine hundred and fifty nine that's a figure. That's times as great as the figures that are commonly used to describe that the genocide rate in the Holocaust was more like six million and so in its and also estimated, but no one knows that a hundred million people died in China during MAO's Cultural Revolution, we now decided that he was going wipe out all of chinese tradition and destroyed. Much of the much of the ancient artifacts that characterize that tradition like a riotous catastrophe that lasted more than a decade. Soldier Etson says the

imagination and strength, spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evil, doers stopped short and a dozen corpses because they had no ideology ideology, that's what gives evil doing its long sought justification and gives the evil, who are the necessary steadfastness and determination. That's the social theory, helps to make his out seem good instead of bad in his own eyes and others. This was how it agents of the inquisition, fortified their wills by invoking Christianity, the conqueror for Lands by extolling the grandeur of their motherland, the colonies, is by civilization. The Nazis I raise the Jacob early and late by equality, brotherhood and happiness of future generations without evildoers there would have been no archipelago. The archipelago. The gulag archipelago is solzhenitsyn. Metaphor for that, for that prison camps like the prison, camps. It exists now in North Korea, in which millions of people

are starving and dying for that. For the prison camps, littered the entire Soviet Union. That, though those cultures came so pathological that in EAST Germany, for example, before the wall fell down and EAST Germany was argued one of the more civilised parts of the soviet state One person out of three was a government in former. So if you have a family of five people, there's a real simple probability that two of them are going to tell a government agent what you say and think, and that that was also trade as the highest possible moral virtue, because it was much better for you to be a admirable citizen of the state than say a loyal daughter and that's what children were too in school that the family was defunct. Unit Individual relationships were secondary and then what mattered was adherence to the dogma that constituted the central axioms of the state. It's a soldier Nixon's description of how commune

this. Ideological uniformity was enforced in the prison camps an anonymous author, is told how executions were carried out at a deck a camp on the patrol river. 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 condemn men were taken into a room one at the time and are the camp guards sprang on them? Their mouths were stuff with something soft in their arms were bound with cords behind their backs. Then they were led out into the courtyard we're harnessed carts, we're waiting the bound prisoners were piled on the cards 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 lifting them, it was much easier to cope with living people than with corpses work. Going for many nights at ADA, and that is how the moral politic community of our party was achieved. You have a rigid belief system and that's what an ideology is because it's axioms are such that it encompasses all of reality, and then there are details left outside the don't seem to fit into that reality. Well, then, you ignore the, but what their embodied. What if there are people who are objecting to the way, you think well, the equivalent to repressing evidence that run contrary to your theory. Is the murder of people who object to what you say and those two these are linked much tighter than you would think you know you might think I would never do something like the communist state in in in in in the what the The evangelist asian of my beliefs, but that the matter is that in June

people will do such things if there are granted the opportunity and provided with the proper apparatus. This is frank off from his account of the concentration camps under Nazi Germany. The most ghastly moment of the twenty four hours of camp life was the awakening. We at a still nocturnal our the three shrill blows of a whistle Pitt list. Lee from our exhausted sleep and from the longings in our dreams, we then began the tough with our wits shoes into which we could scarcely force our feet we're sore and swollen with a demon can then there were the usual moans and groans about petty trouble, such as the snapping of wires, which place shoelaces. One morning I heard someone whom I knew to be brave and dignified cry. The child, because if one,

He had to go out to the snowy marching fields in his bare feet, as his shoes were too shrunk and 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 soldier Niton. Many of the gulag camps continue in two classes of prisoners, rapists, murderers and thieves, we're very well organised in Russia in the Soviet Union and political prisoners, and because the Soviets believed that the real in that people were thieves, murderers and rapists was because of the appalling sociological conditions that they grew. Up into they They were socially friendly elements who could still be redeemed, so they put them in charge of the camps, and so the political and here's where, at the bottom of the hierarchy.

The prisoners ran the camps with minimal supervision, and the camps were often forced labour camps and forced labour meant do some. Thing difficult and pointless until you die It didn't mean it and only Secondarily, produce something of potential value. The state you saw this with Nazi Germany to the Nazis. When they said to lose the second World WAR, they could have stopped their holocaust, machinations and use the people they had imprisoned to build implements too Further the war effort which they did to some degree, so they could have used them ass slaves. So this would be the logic. Take the slaves make the munitions win the war. Then after you one the war you can run around in mop everybody up, but that is not what the Nazis did when they start. To lose. Instead of doing what you think, would irrational in the pursuit of what was hypothetically their goal. They amped up the killing.

And and took resources away from the war itself and so the conclusion that reasonable to draw That is that the killing was the purpose of the war. All the rest of it was just window dressing in exactly as a soldier nets and described in the earlier ports that I told you the ideology was only there to allow the people. Who are fundamentally moated motivated towards genocide and destruction to pretend to themselves that they hadn't become wrought into the absolute corps When push comes to shove and they had to show where there Agencies lie they weren't, even they weren't even valid far the words of the Nazi Party, because they put the continued pursuit of death above their own survival. Even has any ideology its ideology, degenerates and part of the reason for that is that the narrower, the box that you stuff yourself into the weaker your character, becomes because there's nothing left of you, you're, just a shell that has

demons in it and but you're still the sort of thing that can suffer. And so, if you cram everything you are into a box small kite box and you get rid of everything that doesn't fit. You get rid of everything in you that makes life bearable and then life becomes unbearable and then if life becomes unbearable. Well, then of course, you're motivated to do nothing but to take revenge John it, because why? Wouldn't you, if all you were doing with suffering stupidly and meaninglessly. How could you positively? How could you possibly show a a face face to yourself into the rest of humanity? In call lower than sixty degrees below zero work days were written off ads on such days. The record show that the workers had not to work. They were often digging canals on the frozen. Siberian prairie by hand There is one canal am I think it was on the vulgar river, but I can't remember precisely a soldier stolen

killed three hundred thousand people in a single winter, digging it by hand it was done. It was so shallow that no ships could use it, the wreckage, so that the workers had not gone out to work, but they chased them out anyway, and whatever they squeezed out of among those days, was added to the other days, thereby raising the percentages. And the survival medical section rode off those who froze to death on such call days on some other basis. The ones who are left, who could no longer walk and we're straining every sinew to crawl along on all fours on the way back to camp the convoy we shot so that they wouldn't escape before they could come back to get them. This is from William Blake all rose, though art sick, the visible worm that flies in the night In the howling storm have found out, I bet of crimson joy and these dark secret love. Does thy life, destroy ass, a soldier nets and fire

Fire, the branches cracked in the night wind of late autumn blows the flame of the bonfire back and forth. The compound is dark, I'm at the bonfire and I can bring it still some more carpenter shavings. This compound here is a privileged one, so privileged that it's almost as if I were out in freedom. This is an island of Paradise. This is the Martino Sharashka, a scientific institute staff by engineers, staff with prison, there is in its most privileged period. No one is overseeing me calling to a cell chasing me away from the bonfire, and even then it is chili the penetrating wind, but she Already been standing in the wind for hours, her arms great down her head drooping weeping. and growing number still and then again She bigs piteously city Please forgive me, I won't do it again.

The wind carries hormone to me just ass if she were moaning. Next to my ear, the citizen chief at the Gate House fires up his stove does not answer. This was the gate house of the camp next door to us from which workers came into our compound till a water pipes and repair the old ramshackle seminary building across from me Do you want the artfully intertwined many stranded barbed wire barricade in two steps away from the Gate house beneath the bright lantern, the punished girl head hanging, the wind tugging at her gray, work, skirt or feet going numb from the cold. Thin scarf over her head and had been warm during the day when they had been digging a ditch on our territory and another Slipping down into a ravine had called her way to the Vladic Keno Highway and escaped a guard had bundled and Moscow City, buses ran right. Along the highway when they caught him, Was too late to capture 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 whole months because of her escape. And the women bring it tears, 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 click Kip, take off all her hair in front of the line up. This wasn't something she had thought up herself this. The way they punished women in the gulag, but the girl who was now, standing outside the Gate house in the cold, had sighed and said. Instead at least you can have a good time out in freedom for all of us. The jailer overheard, what she said, and now she was being punished everyone else been taken off to the camp, but she had been so outside their to stand at attention in front of the gatehouse. This had been at six p m and it was now eleven p M He tried to shift from one foot to another, but the guard struck out his head and shouted

standard attention, whore or will be worse for you, and now she was not moving only weeping. Forgive me, citizen chief, let me into camp. I won't do it anymore, but even in the cap, nor Was about to say to her alright idiot come on in the reason they were keeping her out there so long was that the next day was Sunday and she not be needed for work such a straw blonde naive, annotate, uneducated slip of a girl. She had been imprisoned for some spool of thread, what a danger thought you express their little sister. They want to teach you a lesson for the rest of your life fire fire. We fought the war. We looked into the bonfire to see what kind of victory would be. The wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire to that

flame and new girl. I promise the whole wide world will read about you from Milton is from pair nice lost, Milton Paradise lost just before the rise of the nation states and knelt, nor so had the intuition that there were some thing wrong with rationality, and he identified rationality with the mythology of Satan and in the mythology of Satan Satan was presented as the highest angel in God's heavenly kingdom. So you can think about It is the highest psychological function who had rebelled against God in them and was then cast into Hell and that idea yeah there's an idea that's being expressed by Milton he was, he was one of the most. He was one of the foremost poetic geniuses of the english language Milton in Shakespeare. And what Milton was trying to understand was what is the nature of evil and his report

presentation gathered up the dream, like theories of evil that have been collected, round all of western civilization for thousands of years and his hypothesis was this. Evil is the force that leaves that its knowledge is complete and that it could do out the transcendent and assume It makes that claim it instantly exists in a place. That's indistinguishable from hell and it could it merely by admitting its error It would never do that. For wine, but from the author of all ill could spring so deep malice to confound the race, of mankind in one route and earth with to mingle and involve done all despite the great creator. This is from Richard. The third Shakespeare 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 in myself, no pity to myself. In its and describes the reactions and actions of Communist party members who were devoured by the system, because that often happened that the prisons system. The gulag system was very indiscriminating. You could land there for good. Lessons are bad and the bad reasons were probably better, because the punishment was more severe if he were in prison for your innocence and communist bar members often got vacuumed up, and this was onto logically eggs essentially intolerable for them because they commit their whole soul to the ideological dogma. And then it's it's tyrannical aspect aspect pick them up and destroyed like like they were worth nothing to say things. Things were info, for them is to say almost nothing. They were incapable of us

simulating such a blow such downfall and from their own people too, from their own dear party, the typical arrest was you're at home with your family in your bed and it's three o'clock in in the morning and doors kick down and they take you out of your bed in whatever you happen to be wearing, and they tell you to say by your family and give you like twenty five seconds to pack and then you're gone. And no one sees you again. They take you to the prison they take off. All your call they shake your head. They have you pick out. Some random from a pile of close, hopefully they don't fit and then you're tried you confess if you will and you're off to the prison camp to say the things were painful for them is to say almost nothing they were in. Capable of assimilating such a blow such a downfall and from there people too, from there dear party and from all appearances for nothing at all

after all, they have been guilty of nothing. As far as the party was concerned, nothing at all it was painful to them to such a degree. Was considered taboo among them on Comrade Radley to ask: what were you in prison for they were the only squeamish generation of prisoners. The rest of us with our songs hanging out couldn't wait to tell the story to every hence newcomer. We met and that the whole sell, as if it were an anecdote, here's the sort of people they were go. Solsberg husband had already been arrested and they had come to carry out the search and arrest her to the search. Did for hours and she's those four hours sorting out the minutes of the car. Congress of the Bristol and brush industry, of which he had been the secretary until the previous day, The incomplete state of the minutes troubled her more than her children who was now leaving forever The interrogator conducting research could not resist telling her come on now safer.

To your children. Here is the sort of people they were From her fifteen year, old daughter came to Elizaveta, set Cova in the Kazan prison for long term prisoners, mama. Tell me write to me: are you guilty or not? I hope you won't give Because, then, I won't during the council, which was the young Communists organization, and I won't forgive them because of you, but if you're guilty, I won't right you anymore, and I will hate you And the mother was stricken by remorse in her damp grave, like cell its Jim little lamp. How could her daughter live without the council more? How could she may be permitted to hate soviet power better that shit hate me, and so she wrote I am guilty enter the komsomol. How could it be anything but hard was more than the human heart could bear to fall beneath the beloved acts and then to have to justify its wisdom

but that's the price a man pays for entrusting. Is God given solely human dogma, even today, anyway, the dogs communist, will affirm that circle that acted correctly even today. They cannot be convinced that this precisely quote the perversion of small forces that the mother birded her daughter harmed her soul. Here's the sort of people they were why d? gave sincere testimony against her husband, anything to the party. Oh, how one could pity them if they at least had come to Perhaps their former wretchedness, this whole chapter could have been writing quick quite differently, if today, at least They had forsaken the earlier views, but it happen the way merrier Daniel and had dreamed it would. If I leave here some day, I'm going to live as if nothing had taken place. Loyalty. In our view, it's just plain pig headedness. Those devoted to the theories

of development. Construed, loyalty to that development to mean renunciation to any personal development whatsoever, as Nikolai Adamovich Dylan, took said. After serving seventeen years, we build if in the party- and we were not mistaken, is this loyalty or pig headedness no. It was not for show, and not out of hypocrisy, hypocrisy that argued in the cells in defence of all the government's actions they need ideological arguments in order to hold onto a sense of their own rightness, wise insanity was not far off, as is from Paradise, lost. So in this scene, Satan is into hell, and it's because of his rebellion against. The transcendent. His idea that he

self is sufficient. This is his statement to his crew. Farewell happy fields where joy forever dwells Hale Horrors, Hale, infernal world and thou profoundest hell. We see thy new possessor, one who brings a mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell or hell of Heaven what Matters where, if I be still the same, and what I should be all but less than he whom thunder have made greater here. At least we shall be free. The almighty have not been here for his envy, will not drivers hands here. We may rain secure and then My choice terrain

is worth ambition, though, in hell better to rein in hell serve in Heaven. The existentialist of the late nineteenth century attempted to diagnose the pathology, of the human personality at a deeper level, I believe than anyone else had ever attempted and there are fundamental conclusion was that destruction by rationality, of the evolved systems, of meaning that people had pre obviously lived within, had undermined the psychological strength of each individual. Divorced from their own history that led them to be too. Gravitate towards either nihilism or as our position to gravitate towards totalitarianism.

The whole twentieth century played out the pendulum swing between nihilism and totalitarianism and in the background, the. Essentialists and the psychodynamic theorists we're putting forward a theory which was that if people lived up to their own, stability and held onto their own experience, as if it were true and did not substitute for that? Any illogical And consensual believes that it would be possible for each person and to find a wellspring of meaning that would be a sufficient replacement for what had been lost historically without having to fall into the falls of nihilism totalitarianism, so you might say well. Nihilism. Well, that's one thing because mostly that affects you, although with your nihilistic than everyone around here, is going to be pulled down as well, but totality

It is as a whole different issue, because what we know now is that, once things become ideologically totalitarian, the next step is mass murder and- and it is to the next- Is mass murder in in a manner that makes it appear that the purpose for the ideological rigidity to begin with was the opportunity to participate in mass murder. So you know how Hitler died. Hitler lost faith in the german people. Or because they were losing the war, and so he can loaded in the waning stages of work More to the german nation be destroyed in fire and everything else that he could pause? we could soon would go with him, and so he died in a bunker underneath Berlin winning was in flames. He committed suicide when Europe was in Flames and Hitler was a worshipper of the kind of fire that purifies use, that is, ology of cleansing fire to do it

into a terrible pact with the with the entire nation that he follow them lead and stolen, stolen. Just didn't just kill individuals that he pulled off the store He he killed all all the engineers, all all the doctors, because he believed they were because held. All the good farmers six million Ukrainians, they moved whole nations of people into Siberia and let them die and there's every effort every bit of evidence. There, I suggest that what Stalin was doing was practicing murderous genocide on an ever larger scale and hoping would culminate in a thermonuclear war, and we escaped that just by a thread. The existentialists make the claim, which I think is a remit,

and powerful claim that the way out of those catastrophic situations is not through poet. Action per se or it's not going. To be resolved by one party defeating another, or one position defeating another that a continuation of the same process that produces the problem, existential in the cycle. Dynamic answer to this problem. Is that more a disease of the soul than a disease of the state and that the way to address it is to ensure that you live in a manner that takes you neither nihilistic nor susceptible to ideological possession. Units and and other other thinkers like him, like Franco,. Believed that this that society was a macro cause them of the individual.

Not the other way around, not that the individual's sub element of society believed that the choice but each individual made was essentially so powerful in relationship to pathological, behavior or honest or honest and thoughtful behavior. As a single individual, properly developed could stand up against a tyranny and win Seems to me- and I thought about this for a very long time- that the lesson of the twentieth Entry is that it, single individual, can stand up against. A tyrant and win and eat give us a single individuals, and the Danes of tyranny and the day nihilism, are not passed and sold as inheritors of the catastrophic. Legacy of the twentieth century and theirs. Habits of the new millennium part of your responsibility,

is to live your own life and to live it honestly and to pay attention to your own experience, and not take me Easy way out that ideological systems offer you they're destined to, For themselves into rigid and murderous pathologies- and you offload your responsibility for thinking and acting to them Then you have to ask yourself: what are they The evidence suggests that they're, not the sort of thing that you want to have in your head.