Existentialism Talk

So we've started to talk about existentialism from the perspective of the individual, but it's necessary to also understand the individual in relationship to the whole. When you're speaking about existential personality theory, it's even more important to place the individual in a broader context. The reason for that, at least in part, is because—well, it's for two reasons. It's that the initial existential theorists, most particularly Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, were very interested in the political consequences of inauthenticity.

Now, Nietzsche believed that it was the drive for truth that had been hyperdeveloped in Europe, at least from a technical perspective, by European submission to Catholicism for thousands of years. That eventually overthrew Christianity in its dogmatic form. But he also believed that the consequences of that would be the weakening of the individual human being, at least initially, who was then more or less cast adrift.

But even more importantly, there would be dire political consequences. He was particularly concerned about the potential for collectivist thinking to exert a murderous hold over the modern world. Now interestingly, at exactly the same time... it's so remarkable how much Nietzsche's life and Dostoevsky's life paralleled one another. It's really as if they were two sides of the same person, because Nietzsche was philosophizing more or less explicitly while Dostoevsky was exploring exactly the same themes in his writing.

There's multiple forms of this parallelism. For example, the ideas that Nietzsche was working out in "Beyond Good and Evil" were the same ideas that possessed, in many ways, Dostoevsky's character Raskolnikov in "Crime and Punishment." Which is a pretty nice parallel title to "Beyond Good and Evil." Even more interestingly, Dostoevsky wrote a novel called "The Possessed" or "The Devils," which I think is the least accessible of his great novels.

It takes about—you know, Dostoevsky's great novels are very long, like great Russian novels tend to be, and they have a very large cast of characters. All of the characters have three names, plus they have nicknames. So it's quite difficult to keep track of them. It takes quite a long time, I think, for a modern reader, especially one who's not familiar with Russia or Russian literature, to have it all come together in a coherent narrative whole, and that's most pronounced, I think, in his book "The Devils."

But "The Devils" is an unbelievably interesting book because it describes individual psychopathology in some ways the same way that Dostoevsky does in "Notes from Underground," but it links it to this susceptibility to a certain kind of political extremism and utopianism in a very direct way. In "Notes from Underground," for example, the main character is very psychologically weak, partly because he doesn't believe in anything.

So because he doesn't believe in anything, even if he's offended, even if he finds something unacceptable personally, he finds it very difficult to stand up in opposition to it or even to stand up for himself because he's so full of doubt that he questions everything he does. Dostoevsky presents the main character in "Notes from Underground" as someone who's fragmented to the point of radical uncertainty.

Now his characters in "The Devils" have the same underlying problem, which is in some sense the demolition of the integrity of their personalities by the collapse of their formal individual and collective belief systems. But instead of becoming riven by uncertainty and doubt, they become possessed by certainty, and hence the name "The Devils" or "The Possessed."

I mentioned to you at one point that Jung famously claimed that people didn't have ideas; ideas had people. I think that is one of the loveliest lines I've ever come across. It's so brilliant. But Dostoevsky's novel "The Possessed" is about how ideas have people. His main character in that novel, if I recollect properly, is named Stavrogin. Stavrogin is the kind of nihilistic thinker who turns to totalitarianism.

Basically, what happens in "The Devils" is that he turns to precisely the ideas that also manifested themselves in radical Marxism and then later, because "The Possessed" was written quite a bit before the death of the Tsar in the Russian Revolution, several decades before that, Dostoevsky felt that these ideas were in the air, in some sense, as an alternative to classical European thought, including not only classical religious thought but also classical Enlightenment thought.

Now, Tolstoy wrote a book called "Confessions," which I would very much recommend reading. It's a very short book. In "Confessions," what happens to Tolstoy is he talks about his experience in Russia when the news of the death of God, in some sense, swept across Russia in a sudden storm. The Russians had been feudal for a very long period of time, and they were backwards in many ways compared to the rest of Europe.

They had stuck in their medieval cultural form far longer than most European states. But when that collapsed, it collapsed with amazing suddenness, with amazing instantaneity. Tolstoy writes in "Confessions" about remembering when the idea first dawned on him and many other people simultaneously that the entire edifice of Orthodox Christianity was no longer tenable.

Then what happens with Tolstoy in "Confessions" is that he describes his absolute collapse as an integrated psychological being and his descent into the underworld—ly speaking. Tolstoy, at the height of his success, and he was the most successful author in the world at one point—certainly, and perhaps, you know, people still argue that maybe he was the greatest author who ever lived, although I think Dostoevsky deserves that title.

But I'm more of a psychologist and a sociologist, and Tolstoy was a sociologist. Tolstoy was unwilling to wander around his estates with either a gun or a rope nearby because he was afraid that he would either shoot or hang himself. It's because he, despite his fame and his great estates and his political work, he was very interested in the emancipation of the serfs, for example.

He concluded, in some sense, that life was an evil joke. It was as if life was an evil joke being played on mankind by a cruel creator, and that everything was ultimately meaningless but finitely terrible, generating nothing but pointless suffering. Tolstoy said very, very clearly that a man with conviction who came to that conclusion could only continue to live by deluding himself.

He thought he couldn't think himself out of the proposition that his unwillingness to kill himself was a form of cowardice once he had come to that realization. So "Confessions" is about that, and, you know, he tries to turn to the kind of religion that characterized the Russian peasantry, which would be, you know, in some sense, an ignorant immersion in beliefs that intellect had superseded. But of course, that wasn't available to him.

At the end of "Confessions," something happens to Tolstoy to redeem him in a sense, but all it is is a dream. He dreams that he's suspended over a great abyss by a rope, and as far down as he can look, there's nothing but empty space. But then he turns to look up, and he can see the same rope above him, stretching up into the sky as far as it can reach.

That's basically how the book ends, and, you know, the inference is something like Tolstoy's dream revealed to him the proposition that, although there were abysmal depths beneath mankind, so to speak from a psychological perspective, we were also supported by something infinite. But it's not articulated; the whole book just ends with the dream.

So Dostoevsky lays out the underground political movements that were characteristic of the late 19th century, the late 1800s in Russia, and he describes the emergence of the type of person who ends up, after the Russian Revolution, after the First World War, becoming committed and involved in the collectivization process in Russia.

It's virtually impossible to overstate how terrible the collectivization process was right from its onset. You know, you'll still hear apologists for Marxism and communism talk about the fact that the Soviet Union was captured by a cult of personality under Stalin and that that's why the ethical presuppositions of Marxism, transformed into political action, became so corrupted. But I think that's absolute nonsense.

I think it's nonsense of the most dangerous and reprehensible type, and I think that for two reasons. The first reason was Stalin was an unbelievably murderous thug. He pretty much killed everyone he knew, including almost all of the... they called them... what were they? I don't remember— the term they were old revolutionaries, all of the Bolsheviks who ran the revolution who didn't die during the revolution or of natural causes afterward—they were all killed by Stalin. He probably killed his wife; he killed pretty much everybody he knew.

I mean, he was an underground operative for Lenin during the revolution itself, where he learned to be committed from an ideological perspective. He'd come from quite an intensely religious background. He learned to be committed from an ideological perspective, but then, basically, acting as a guerrilla assassin during the revolution itself. Later he rose to power, and he certainly used Lenin's political machinations as a template for his later activity.

But Lenin was no saint when it came to extraordinarily brutal activity motivated by utopian dreams. Now, what seemed to happen, in some sense, is that you can imagine, and we're looking at the political structure, the political movements of whole nations; we're going down to the bottom to look at it from a psychological perspective, instead of thinking of it from an economic perspective or a power perspective.

In some sense, it's a Jungian analysis of the rise of political movements in Europe and across the world, with an existential spin. You can imagine that what classical Christianity had set up for people was not only a belief in a shared moral reality that everyone was supposed to be participating in, but also some meaning for each individual's life, to some degree, no matter how much they were suffering.

Then the promise of a kind of perfection after death. And of course, people like Freud and people like Marx considered that an illusion designed either to protect the population from fear of death, so that would be Freud's argument, or Marx's argument would be, well, that was a conspiracy, in some sense, promoted by the political and religious elite to keep the people who were being oppressed in their place.

Well, of course, there's some truth to both of those, but there's a difference between some truth and the truth. Any extraordinarily complex phenomena has multiple causal elements, and those are two important ones. Because, of course, an anxiety about death and power are two very important psychological phenomena, and they play their role in determining any important collective or individual activity. But you can't forget about the rest of the story.

Now, this collapses, and that leaves a void, and that void is a void in people's souls, so to speak. It makes them nihilistic, for example, because they can't see any ultimate meaning in what they're doing. But it also simultaneously makes them more susceptible to utopian mass movements of a rational type. Of course, that's exactly what happened with regards to the Marxists and with regards to the fascists.

So what Hitler offered his followers, in collaboration with them—because it wasn't so much that Hitler told people what he wanted them to think—as it was that Hitler listened to what the crowds wanted and then told it back to them in a collaboration that extended across his entire rule, because Hitler was a great populist and he was very, very good at receiving messages from the audience.

But Hitler basically offered his population the dream of racial superiority and world domination, you know, as well as many, many other things that went along with that. So then, of course, Marx offered his followers the idea that the oppressed could shed their chains and that everyone could unite—workers and intellectuals alike. In particular, it was more the owning class, the bourgeois, as they're still called by some people, who were the evil oppressors.

The union of worker and intellectual would eventually shepherd in a golden age where everyone offered to society as much as they could offer and took from society as much as they needed, right? And that's the famous phrase, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," which sounds wonderful. You can—I can understand why that would be an attractive slogan.

But if you start to think about how that would be administered in practice, and if you really start to think it through, you realize very, very rapidly that it's a recipe for absolute disaster. Partly because, well, how do you tell the difference between your need and your need? If your mother needs cancer surgery and your genius brother needs to go do his Ph.D., whose need trumps?

Well, and that's just a trivial problem because all of you have those competing needs, and how anybody is ever going to adjudicate between the value of needs is beyond cognitive comprehension. It just can't be done— not without brutality, especially because, you know, there are limited resources.

Then the next question is, well, okay, you're supposed to contribute according to your ability. How much ability do you have? You know, what that meant in practice was that people were frequently worked to death because ability isn't a definable entity, you know? And unless you have some sort of complicated and functional system to negotiate, to allow people to negotiate amongst themselves peaceably about what they're going to offer and what they're going to take, you have to turn it over to something like a centralized authority.

You know, that's just... well, you don't need much imagination to understand that that would be an absolute catastrophe. And it was an absolute catastrophe. Now, one of the things that's really interesting about Dostoevsky's book "The Devils" is that it segues almost perfectly into Alexander Solzhenitsyn's description of the emergence of the Russian prisoners, the Soviet prison camps after the revolution.

So basically what happened—and this is what Solzhenitsyn revealed in the 1970s—was that because the communist system was so financially untenable, the principles just didn't work for all sorts of reasons. The system ended up running basically on a system of work camps. So much of what the Russians produced—the Soviets produced—which wasn't very much, by the way, although they got industrialized very, very rapidly—was produced by people who were basically enslaved. That's the only way the system could continue to function.

Now, Solzhenitsyn estimated that between 1919, which is basically the end of the First World War, and 1959, which is basically when the Stalinist era came to an end—so that's only 40 years—that 60 million people were killed in the Soviet Union as a consequence of internal repression. That didn't count the Second World War.

Now, people debate these figures, and Solzhenitsyn is surprisingly, to me, a controversial figure because I don't see where the controversy is. People complain about his numbers, claiming that a death count of 60 million people over that period of time is mathematically untenable, but more reasonable estimates, if you want to put it that way, put it up to 20 or 30 million. And the truth of the matter is that no one knows, and that even makes it worse.

I mean, we do know, for example, that the attempts at collectivization in the 1920s led to the creation of an agricultural catastrophe made worse by Stalin's peculiar economic policies that killed six million people in the Ukraine in the 1930s. Now, how many of you knew that? How many of you know about the Ukrainian famine? How many didn't know?

Okay, one thing you might want to ask yourself is why the hell don't you know? You know, you know lots of things about the mass deaths in the 20th century, but my experience has been that students in the West know almost nothing about what happened as a consequence of the imposition of radical left-wing dictatorships. And it's not trivial—30 million in the Soviet Union, let's say; six million in Cambodia under Pol Pot.

Pol Pot was trained at the Sorbonne, and he took what he learned at the Sorbonne from his radical left-wing professor and put it into practice in Cambodia. He emptied out the cities because he had learned that under standard Marxist dogma, city people who were mostly bourgeois were parasites on the workers. He emptied the cities and killed six million people.

Then, in China during Mao's Cultural Revolution, while no one really knows, Solzhenitsyn's estimates were 100 million, but you can take half that if you want. These are massive, massive numbers of people, and part of the reason that I think it's reprehensible to pin the absolute catastrophes of the Soviet state on the Stalinist cult of personality was that it didn't only happen in the Soviet Union; it happened with catastrophic results in all sorts of places where these economic policies were implemented.

I believe that the reason that Western students, roughly speaking, don't know about these things is that the intelligentsia of the West, Europe, and North America, we're going to say for the time being, were so heavily influenced by radical left-wing ideas from the 1920s well to the present day that these facts have never been made as a, have never been disseminated in as thorough a manner as is only appropriate.

So, the French intellectuals, for example, from whom postmodernism derived—people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Foucault, and a very large group of French intellectuals who were involved in the student radical left student movements in the late 1960s and who ended up barricading the streets of Paris in 1968, which is when the student movement sort of peaked and then fell away—they never apologized in any real sense for their being enamored of, well, at least in part, the policies of Stalin and also the policies of Mao.

And there's no excuse for that. So now the problem is, of course, is that left-wing radical political and economic ideas are intellectually quite coherent. Like, they make sense once you accept a certain set of axioms like "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." You accept that axiom; you accept the idea that the capitalist class, which is roughly anyone who owns anything, only owns what they own because they've stolen it from someone else.

So that labor is productive, but nothing else is productive; everything else is a secondary derivation of labor. And you know, that's an absolutely moronic economic theory because obviously there's work that has value and there's work that has no value. The fact that it's difficult has almost no relationship to whether or not it has value.

Unfortunately, you know, it's not like the political system or the economic system is a perfect mirror of effort. It's not like that at all. So you might say that, well, I would say, really, what happened in the 20th century is once people stopped worshiping an externalized deity, they started to worship, if they were intelligent, rational utopian ideas. And if they weren't as intelligent, they turned to identification with the state, like the Nazis, for example—identification with the state as an alternative source of collective power.

Both of those were incomprehensibly devastating. And we're not done with it yet, you know? I mean, one of the things that happened in the Soviet Union—and Solzhenitsyn, one of whose I have, you know, read one of the chapters of "The Gulag Archipelago," which is an amazing piece of writing—one of the things that Solzhenitsyn points out is there was this extensive prison camp system in the Soviet Union that he called the "Gulag Archipelago." It was this chain of camps all across the Soviet Union.

If you were thrown in there because you were a political prisoner, you were the worst kind of prisoner. And you could be thrown in there as a political prisoner pretty much for expressing any opinion whatsoever about the state, which is... we're going to get back to that as we tie this together with existentialism. Now the Communists regarded the murderers, the rapists, and the thieves as socially friendly elements because it was part of Marxist doctrine that the only reason that you would become a murderer or a thief or a rapist was because you were part of an oppressed class, and your poverty was what generated your crime.

So, in some sense, you couldn't be held personally responsible for it. The upshot of that was that the thieves and the rapists and the murderers ran the prisons. Well, Russia right now is a mafia state. There's evidence, for example, that Putin is the richest man in the world, and he has almost singular power over the affairs of the Soviet Union. The Russians, the Soviets, killed anybody that had any capacity for independent thought, and they raised the thugs to the highest positions of authority.

And you guys are going to be dealing with that for the rest of your life. So, and if you think that that's changed, you're wrong; it hasn't changed at all. Russia's just transformed from a totalitarian communist state into a mafia state, and that's a big problem. So we're not done with this yet. Now, one of the things that Solzhenitsyn... he was... this is why I use him as a psychological thinker, you know? People generally consider Viktor Frankl the primary existential psychologist or psychiatrist.

Now, Viktor Frankl came through the Nazi prison camps, and he developed logotherapy as a consequence of that. Part of the principles of logotherapy were laid forth in his book "Man's Search for Meaning." One of Frankl's propositions was essentially that because life is suffering and can be unbearable suffering, that it's necessary for people to have a countervailing meaning to buttress themselves against the tragedy of existence.

Frankl basically claimed—and this is an existential claim—that you could find that meaning in collective belief, but that there were terrible dangers associated with that. So your moral obligation was to find that meaning within the confines of your own authentic individual life. You can see that sort of idea also arising in the thought of Carl Rogers, for example, and it's also there in Jung because, of course, Jung believed that there was this path he called individuation, which was the flowering and manifestation of the healthy and integrated—deep, healthy and integrated—fundamental human personality.

Of course, Piaget believed something similar, although more collective, because for Piaget the hammering of your psyche into something resembling an integrated state also had to be done in active concert with all of the people around you. You know, because you were organizing yourself into a coherent internal game where all your little subpersonalities could find their place while simultaneously doing that with other people over long spans of time.

But you can see this theme that emerges in all of those thinkers. One of the themes is this: that there are healthy pathways to psychological development. The existentialists in particular, although this was also the case with Jung—Jung worked as a secret agent for the American government and provided the President of the United States with psychological reports on Hitler's state of mind—that wasn't even discovered until about three years ago.

So all of these thinkers were concerned about collective pathology, and at the same time concerned about individual development, and I don't think you can really separate those things. The reason that I use Solzhenitsyn is because he basically takes the same tack as Viktor Frankl, especially in "The Gulag Archipelago," but it's a much more thoroughly developed body of thought.

I'm an admirer of Frankl—I think "Man's Search for Meaning" is an amazing book. But it's a good book, whereas "The Gulag Archipelago" is a devastatingly profound book. They're not in the same league; you know, it's like Solzhenitsyn is to Viktor Frankl what Dostoevsky is to virtually any other author. There's this... I don't know what it is about the damn Russians; maybe their suffering has done something to them over the hundreds of years that it's been in place.

But they can produce people of unbelievable profundity as well as, you know, crooks who are crooked and murderous beyond comprehension. Solzhenitsyn was very interested in trying to understand what happened to the Soviet Union. How could it transform itself into a state that devoured the majority—or a vast minority—of its citizens, and often the best of the citizenry? I mean, it was very common in the Soviet Union—and this is throughout the entire Soviet Bloc—I mean, you were required to be an informer, roughly speaking.

You were certainly taught to be an informer at school. The Soviets made much of children who were patriotic enough to turn in their own parents; you know, they were held up as models of behavior. It was very frequently the case that if you denounced a neighbor, that was a really good way for your family to get their apartment.

Apartments were an incredibly scarce supply, and far too many people generally lived in the same locale. So if you were a three-generation family living in a one-bedroom apartment, one of the most effective ways to get your children a new apartment was to denounce the neighbor down the hallway, and as a reward, you'd be given the apartment. Well, you can imagine who would take advantage of that kind of offer.

Now what happened in the 1920s during the collectivization... so here’s the idea: the serfs had been emancipated in the late 1800s, and they were basically feudal inhabitants of parcels of land who were more or less owned by the nobility. It wasn't exactly slavery, but because the serfs had certain sets of rights, it was closer to slavery than to anything else that you would conceptualize from a modern perspective.

The serfs were emancipated in the late 1800s, actually at about the same time that slavery was abolished in the United States—approximately the same period of time, anyway. There was, of course, Russia had a very rich aristocracy and it had a monarchy. So the idea that there was an underclass of impoverished people and an overclass of aristocratic parasites was a compelling idea.

It was a compelling idea in many places in Russia, especially at the turn of the century, and that was partly because the Industrial Revolution was brutal, and farm life was very difficult, and there was a massive gap between rich and poor. That was an attractive political explanation, and it had partial truth, because, of course, people are exploited. Often, poor people are poor because they're exploited, but there are lots of other reasons to be poor, and rich people are sometimes rich because they exploit.

But of course, there are a lot of other reasons to be rich as well. So these ideas were put into practice by the Bolshevik revolutionaries, and one of the most comprehensive manifestations of that idea took place in the 1920s when the Soviets underwent a process that they called "de-kulakization."

Now, imagine this: in the late 1800s, the serfs were emancipated. What that meant was that some people started to own their own land—you know? They weren't nobles that owned estates; they were more like what we would consider sort of middle-class farmers. So they owned some land, they owned some animals, they might own a half-decent house in town, and they might have done enough or been fortunate enough to have collected enough money and enough property and enough ability so that they could hire one or two people to help them with their crops.

So they were by no means rich, but they were the successful farming class of the Soviet Union. Okay, now the Communists put forward the idea that there is no way that you could have a brick house in town and own more cows than your neighbor and have some productive land put aside and, worst of all, hire someone to work for you unless you had essentially stolen that from your neighbors.

So then the Communists would send out activists from the cities, and they would go to these towns and start spreading this doctrine. Okay? Now, you've got to think this through: who is going to be most responsive to that doctrine? Well, it's going to be the most jealous, useless, jealous and resentful people in town.

It's going to be the guys that are hanging around in the local bar drinking themselves half to death every day, who feel they've been totally screwed over by life, that are that hate the people who have come up with a modicum of prosperity. Then someone comes along and says, "Hey, as far as our doctrine goes, those people you hate? They're nothing better than thieves. It's your moral and patriotic duty to rise up and take everything they have."

And that's exactly what happened. During the de-kulakization process, there would basically be mobs of jealous and resentful thugs who would go into the houses of these moderately prosperous people who were actually the only people in the Soviet Union who knew how to farm, and they took everything. Everything! They would go into their houses and strip them bare and take all the animals.

Then what the Communists did with the kulaks was they allowed them to take... they were going to resettle them up mostly in Siberia. Well, there were no settlements in Siberia. So basically what that meant was hastily-built rail lines would take them in the middle of the winter with their families and dump them on the frozen prairie, where, well, all the children would die, and everybody more or less would freeze to death.

And so, you know, the Communists said, "Well, you could take two months' worth of food with you." But of course they didn't make any provisions for having that two months' worth of food. And after you had gone through the process of de-kulakization, you could bloody well be sure that you didn't have two months' worth of food left that you could take when you were suddenly bundled onto the trains and driven to the middle of nowhere.

Well, you know, after a number of years of that—which also involved the forced collectivization of all the remaining people, the distribution of the land in principle to everyone, and then collective farming—well, the entire agricultural economy fell apart. That was particularly the case in the Ukraine, which is a very, very fertile part of the world and which was the breadbasket of Russia, roughly speaking.

Well, everybody starved. The Communists had to put up posters telling people that eating their children was wrong. They would kill people if they went out in the fields after the harvest. So they would go out with their big harvesting machines, vacuum up all the grain, ship it to the cities because the cities were also starving, and leave nothing for the people behind.

Then, if you went out there in the field, like if you were a mother and your child was starving to death and you went out there in the field and you picked up individual kernels of grain so that you could gather them in a cup and bring them home to feed your family, that was an executable crime because you were stealing from the state. If you're going to go out there and bloody well pick up the wretched little kernels that are left half crushed into the ground, that it was your moral obligation to turn those over to the state because I suppose that was part of your ability, and the need somewhere else was greater.

Well, Solzhenitsyn was very interested in how the hell this sort of thing could even happen, you know? Because—and he wasn't interested in it precisely from a political perspective. I mean, I would say he started being interested in it from a political perspective, analyzing the actions of people like Lenin and Stalin. He wrote a very interesting book on Lenin, which was one of the first documents that made Lenin out to be the same sort of person that Stalin was, even though I think now the historical evidence for that is crystal clear.

But Solzhenitsyn ended up, more by doing, a psychological analysis. And that's because, as he considered what had happened to his country, he couldn't escape the proposition that the reason it had become so corrupt was because all of the individuals within it had allowed themselves to become corrupt.

So one, if you're wondering, for example, how you know your political system has become corrupt—or let's put it differently: how you know that any system that you happen to be embedded in has become corrupt—one way of assessing that, judging that, is to determine for yourself whether or not you're allowed to say what you think.

You know? I mean, you can genuinely think something without it being right, obviously, but if you genuinely think something, that's your truth. And, you know, in the marketplace of free ideas, everyone is allowed to express their truth. That doesn't mean everyone's right; it doesn't mean that you have any right to have people listen to you; it doesn't grant you any access to power. But at least you get to say what you think, and if that's withheld from you or you're punished for it, you can bloody well be certain that the system has started to take a vicious turn towards oppression and repression, and that the outcome of that's going to be bad.

Even if your thoughts are reprehensible, you should be allowed to put them forward, not least because the rest of society needs to know where the dangerous wingnuts are so that you can—so that the ideas can be brought up, you know, out in the open and disqualified. You know? So freedom of speech encompasses the freedom to say the most outrageous things just so everybody knows what you're thinking.

Because if you can't say it, that doesn't mean you're not thinking it. It's just going to go underground and fester there like a Freudian repressed thought. So freedom of speech has nothing to do with protecting the kind of speech that is necessarily pro-social. It's exactly the opposite of that. You want everybody to say what they're thinking because then you know what they're thinking.

And, well, and it's also often the case that people can't come to the truth unless they're allowed to express their untruth and have that, you know, criticized in the public forums. So Solzhenitsyn's conclusion was that there was no way that the terrors of the Soviet state could have got the foothold that they got unless individual people were willing to falsify the nature of their own experience.

In "The Gulag Archipelago," he basically describes a society—it's 2,700 pages long, this book, and it's little tiny type. It's a very, very comprehensive examination. He basically shows you story after story, tells you story after story of how people falsified their experience in the service of the state. And so the story is basically something like this: he said, "This is what happens when you give your god-given soul over to human dogma."

So the basic idea is, well, you're left in a sphere that has the absence of a well-defined meaning. So that's a consequence of the collapse of the previous belief systems. Because you're torn apart by that, in some sense, you don't know where to turn. And one direction is, of course, nihilistic, and the other direction perhaps is totalitarian.

Now, another direction might be that you try to figure things out on your own and still live a life that's truthful and that has integrity. But we're going to leave that alone for a moment because it's difficult to even conceptualize that might exist if you've already swallowed the presupposition that all values have fallen apart. You turn to totalitarianism, okay? It tells you what to think; it tells you how to act; it tells you how your society should be structured. But it does some things that are even more subtle and subtly destructive than that because what it also does is paint a future utopia, which is an organization of the state where everyone has everything they want permanently.

Now Dostoevsky, when he wrote "Notes from Underground," he basically said—well, this was way before the Communist Revolution—he said he was talking about these sorts of utopian, egalitarian conscious things. He said, they've got human beings completely wrong, right? Right from the bottom up. Because if you took the typical person, he says, if you gave them everything they possibly wanted to eat so that all they had to ever do was eat delicious cakes, and they didn't have any other responsibilities than, what did he say? Indulging in the continuation of the human species? And so that if they were so happy, that if you put them underwater, nothing but bubbles of bliss would float up to the surface—the first thing that people who were put in that situation would do would be to wander around smashing things just so that something unexpected and interesting would happen.

You know, it's a brilliant critique of utopianism because it's exactly right. Dostoevsky basically said people are so crazy that they'd rather be subjected to inconvenient and unexpected occurrences than just to lay there all sated with bliss. And so there was something wrong with the whole utopian notion right from the get-go because that's just not what people are like. They'd rather have interesting trouble than non-interesting perfection, you know? And I think that's an incredibly powerful idea.

But anyway, way you can just think about that in relationship to your own character. I mean, how often do you do something that's troubled just to see what happens? I mean, it's exactly what people are like. You know, even chimpanzees—juvenile chimps—if they see an old male sleeping underneath the tree, they'll go and poke him with a stick just to see what happens. You know? And it's like, well, if you can't see humanity in that sort of behavior, there's something wrong with you.

But the utopians offered this vision of the future, which was basically paradise on earth. But they also proposed that it was something that could be attained through certain types of direct political action, which usually meant, well, fix your neighbor up or, even worse, meant steal what he has because he shouldn't have it anyways. And the problem with the utopian vision essentially was that if my theory is associated with a future utopia in a logical way, so I can make a case to you that if you do this and we do that and they do this and we organized things this way, then we'll usher in a period of prosperity that’s almost heavenly in its promise—the problem with that is it means we can do any bloody thing we want right now because the end product is so valuable that it justifies it.

And so what happens is that the utopian vision turns into a rationale for the most destructive forms of behavior in the here and now. And then, when someone's called to task for it, it's like, "What the hell do you think you're doing?" You know, they’ll say something like, "Well, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." You know? And that's all well and good if you happen to be making the omelet, but it's not so damn good if you happen to be one of the eggs.

And there were plenty of eggs broken on the way to, you know, the Soviet vision of success. Well, and you know, there's good evidence by the time the mid-1950s came around—there's pretty decent evidence from the KGB archives that Stalin was preparing to launch a thermonuclear war against Europe.

I mean, he’d already killed God only knows how many million people by that point. A few more hundred million weren't really going to weigh that heavily on his conscience. The last book I read on Stalin, which was published, was called "Stalin," it was written by a guy who had access to the KGB and Communist Party archives. He claimed that Khrushchev and three other people killed Stalin in the late 1950s to stop him from invading Europe.

So, I mean, you know, in the battle between the Communist utopians and the West, we came this close to wiping everything out several times. So now what happened in some sense was this: this theory was laid out to cover the world. So the Marxist theory presented itself as a scientific theory, an inevitable theory of history.

The theory of history was that the warfare between the oppressed and the oppressor was the primary fact of life and that that needed to transform itself into an egalitarian utopia. There were certain states, political states, that mankind would have to go through to reach that end.

Okay, so that was basically the theory, and part of the theory was that to get to that point, then resources had to be distributed equally to all, which sounds fine in principle, but then again, the devil's always in the details. How to distribute resources equally is by no means self-evident. You know? Part of the reason that the English came up with the idea of the free market, this is Adam Smith fundamentally, is because Smith figured out that trying to figure out what things were worth is so complicated that you can't actually calculate it.

So then we would say, well, what's your cat worth? I'd say, well, would you give me your coat for $5, $2, $1,000? Okay? So the point being is that, you know, there's no way of establishing the worth of things because the worth of one thing is its worth in relationship to all other things of worth. Like it's a continual interaction between all things of worth, and the only way you can make that calculation is by letting individual people make micro-choices.

And that the value of things is established as a consequence of a hundred billion micro-choices. We'd call that, in the modern world, we'd call something that, some that's something like distributed cognition. You know, it's like you're outsourcing a price decision to the marketplace. What’s this thing worth? Well, the answer is whatever people will trade for it.

And it's not a copout; it's an illustration, an indication of the fact that you can't come up with a computation that will allow you to determine what something is worth. You know, and I can give you an example of that from my own life. I developed some software to help people hire employees, and we did the mathematical calculations and figured out that if people used this particular software instead of going through an interview process, which doesn't work very well, that it would basically... if they gave it to ten people to select one employee, that it would save them about 35% of the salary of the hired person per year.

So if you hired someone who was being paid $100,000, then the return on investment would be $35,000 a year. And we could sell this for, say... well, we didn't know how much to charge for the tests then. So you might say, well, if it's $35,000 a year and you're going to have this person around for four years because that's how long the average person stays in their job, that's $150,000.

And so then you only have to use ten tests, and so maybe we could take half of the first year, so that'd be $177,000. So it would be $1,750 a test, and you'd get like a... what is it? You'd get an eight-time return on your investment.

Well, you should be just jumping at that! Well, it doesn't work like that at all. We ended up having to sell it for about $20 a test, and we could hardly sell it to anyone because, well, for reasons that are far too complex to go into.

But my point is that it's impossible to make a pricing decision. It's really, really difficult. And to think that you could make a conscious and pre-programmed pricing decision for every single commodity is completely insane. And that's what they tried to do in the Soviet Union.

And I read at one point that the central pricing committee had to make 10,000 pricing decisions a day. You can't even come up with the price of one! You’ve put things on Kijiji and, you know, it's like, "What's it worth?" Well, you look at what everyone else is paying for it, roughly speaking, unless it depends on how quickly you want to sell it and what kind of shape it's in and, you know, it's complicated.

You might have a pricing guideline; you just have to look the damn thing up. It's still hard to figure out what the price is. But imagine you have no comparative information at all. What's a hypodermic needle worth? Well, I guess it depends on whether you need it to inject the penicillin that's going to save your life or if you're just putting it in your cupboard to store it. But it's a complicated decision.

Alright, so anyways, this utopian scheme was set up, and we're acting on the proposition that people used it, at least in part, as a replacement for their alternative for their old belief systems, which I think is a perfectly reasonable proposition.

But we're also going to take a psychoanalytic approach, and we're going to say, well, it also allowed people to manifest bad faith because if your worth can be determined by how good a cog you are in the fascist or communist machinery, it pretty much alleviates you of any responsibility that you have to have for your own life.

So that, for every positive reason that you might join a utopian movement, there's a negative reason, which is, well, you can benefit from its exploitive nature, and you don't have to take any responsibility. Well, Solzhenitsyn and Frankl both talked about that a lot, as did Nietzsche, but Frankl and Solzhenitsyn are more interesting because they actually happened to live through the imposition of systems like that and could see them from the inside.

Solzhenitsyn's first observation was that Marxist economics didn't work. Well, that was a big problem because it was supposed to work. Not only was it supposed to work; it was supposed to work perfectly. And what that basically meant was that if it didn't work, you only had one of two options: you could either abandon the damn system and start to complain about the fact that you had to line up for bread for four hours a day, which was perfectly typical daily activity for people, for example, in Poland and in Russia before the wall came down.

Everything cost nothing but there wasn't anything to buy, so it wasn't very much of a bargain. Instead of paying for your bread with money, you just paid for it with time. You stayed in line for two hours or three hours or five hours, and when you got to the front of the line at the department store, you took whatever the hell was there because you didn't even know what it was that you were going to be buying when you joined the lineup.

And so it wasn't like it was free; you just paid for it with your time. So Solzhenitsyn noted that what happened as the system continued to manifest its counterproductive properties was that either people had the choice of saying, "Oh, this isn't working worth a damn; there must be something rotten in Denmark," or pretending that everything was alright and lying about everything.

And that's what they did; they lied about everything. And so we got the situation up to the point where in East Germany, before the wall came down, one out of every three people was a government informer. So that meant if you had a family of six people, two of them were telling the government what you were talking about at dinner, and that was their duty.

What that meant in these societies was no one ever said anything that they meant ever. And if they did, the probability that the KGB was going to kick down their door at four in the morning and take them off to the central prison before dumping them in some damn camp where they'd never see anybody they ever knew for the rest of their life was extraordinarily high.

So you watched everything you said and everything you thought around your wife, around your brother, around your sister, around your children, and the whole system ground onward in a miasma of absolute deception and lie. Solzhenitsyn's point, as well—and this is one of Frankl's main points—is that if people had had... if people had decided to stop lying, the system would have ground to a halt.

But that isn't what people did; they just kept lying. Now, he noticed when he was in the prison camps, because he was in them for a long time, he did encounter people inside the camps, like Frankl did, who were absolutely unwilling to falsify their experience.

So for example, one of the things that had to happen if you were arrested by the KGB and sentenced to a prison camp was that it was necessary for you to sign a confession. And that's so peculiar. You think, well, they're going to arrest you arbitrarily and put you on trial for trumped-up nonsense; why couldn't they just forge your damn signature?

It's like, why did they care if you confessed? And the answer to that was, well, it was part of the way the system kept itself validated because the people who were torturing you could justify the torture if you agreed that you were actually at fault. And so rather than face the fact that they were just doing something corrupt to innocent people, they'd extract a confession out of you so that they could convince themselves that you deserved exactly what you got.

Now Solzhenitsyn said at one time that one person who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny. Now that's a pretty radical statement, but you know, when he wrote "The Gulag Archipelago," I mean, he memorized that damn book when he was in one of the prison camps because they didn't give him pencil or paper, and even if they did, they wouldn't have been able to carry the damn manuscript around.

So he basically memorized it—2,700 pages, you know, written at the volume of a very loud scream. When he got out of the prison camps, he had two copies of it typed out, one by one typist and one by another. They didn't know each other; the KGB broke into the one typist's home and stole the manuscript, and she killed herself then.

Well, and you can understand why; she thought this was a tremendously valuable piece of work, and she thought it was the only copy, and they destroyed it. Well, he couldn't even tell her that there was another one because they would have got it too. Well, then it was exported to the West in unpublished form, and published in English to begin with, and it was an absolute bombshell.

It was published in 1974, and at that point, anyone who had any moral integrity whatsoever and who was also literate read that and said, "Oh, okay, game over. All those propositions? They're wrong beyond belief, and that part of what we thought might be possible is done." Well, you know, that happened to some degree; communism lost a tremendous amount of its intellectual credibility, and that was part of the reason it fell over in 1989.

But, you know, it's not like everybody has shaken their... it’s not as if everyone's faith in that sort of thing has been shaken; you know, there's this massive stream of Marxist utopianism that's still running through postmodernism, and that's, you know, made its way to Western universities all over the world.

So despite all of this, despite these tens of millions of deaths and this total moral corruption, and no one even knows about it—and I don't understand that; it's completely... it's completely unacceptable. It's the biggest lesson of the 20th century, you know? And we hear a lot about the Holocaust, and no wonder—it was a truly terrible thing—but there's all these other events of the 20th century that were absolutely catastrophic, and they're not part of general knowledge.

You have to ask yourself why. Because if we can't learn from that, if we can't learn from all those tens of millions of people who were tortured to death and ruined in political prisons, you gotta ask yourself: Can we actually learn anything?

I'm going to read you some of the things that Solzhenitsyn wrote. He doesn't say the name of this person; it's in dashes. Someone he met either in a camp or afterward told how executions were carried out at Adak, a camp on the Pure River. They would take the opposition members with their things out of the camp compound at night, and outside the compound stood the small house of the third section.

These were people who were opposing the Communist ideology. The condemned men were taken into a room one at a time, and there the camp guard sprang on them. Their mouths were stuffed with something soft, and their arms were bound with cords behind their backs. Then they were led out into the courtyard where harnessed carts were waiting. The bound prisoners were piled on the carts—five to seven at a time—and driven off to the Gorka, the camp cemetery.

On arrival, they were tipped into big pits that had already been prepared and buried alive. Not out of brutality—no! It had been calculated that when dragging and lifting them, it was much easier and more efficient to cope with living people than with corpses. The work went on for many nights at Adak, and that is how the moral-political unity of our party was achieved.

This is from Frankl. This is the concentration camps in Nazi Germany: "These were the size of cities, by the way. I mean, when you think of a camp, I don't know what image it brings up in your mind, but you might think of an enclosure the size of a city block or something like that, but that's not right. These places were the size of cities because there were tens of thousands of people in them."

The most ghastly moment of the 24 hours of camp life was the awakening, when at a still nocturnal hour the three shrill blows of a whistle tore us pitilessly from exhausted sleep and from the longings in our dreams. We then began the tussle with our wet shoes into which we could scarcely force our feet, which were sore and swollen with edema, and there were the usual moans and groans about petty troubles such as the snapping of wires which replaced shoelaces.

One morning, I heard someone whom I knew to be brave and dignified cry like a child because he finally had to go to the snowy marching grounds in his bare feet, as his shoes were too shrunken for him to wear. In these ghastly moments, I found a little bit of comfort, a small piece of bread which I drew out of my pocket and munched with absorbed delight.

This is Solzhenitsyn. So in these camps, people were set out to work, and it would depend on where they were, what they were working on, but maybe it was the digging of a canal, or maybe they were setting up a factory, or they were doing something that required that generally required intense physical effort. Each of these camps had a—they had a goal, right? That was established from above.

It's like a five-year plan. Your camp is to produce this much in this period of time, and then if you didn't produce that much in that period of time, then the people who ran the camp were going to be held accountable, which generally meant that they were going to be put in some camp themselves. And so there was every reason to drive people to their death in order to fulfill the work norms.

And when that didn't happen, they just falsified the records anyways because what the hell was their choice? And Solzhenitsyn talks about how they got around the rules in cold weather, in 60 degrees below zero. Work days were written off. In other words, on such days, the record showed that the workers had not gone out to work.

Well, then you can tell a bit about the benevolence of the Soviet state: if it was 55 below, well, then you could go out to work, but if it was 60 below, you got to stay home. Well, that isn't even how it worked. In other words, on 60-below days, the record showed that the workers had not gone to work, but they chased them out anyways.

Whatever they squeezed out of them on those days was added to the other days, thus raising the percentages. And the servile medical section wrote off those who froze to death on such cold days on some other basis. The ones who were left, who could no longer walk and were straining every sinew to crawl along on all fours on the way back to camp, the convoy simply shot so that they wouldn't escape before they could come back to get them.

So Stalin had a group of people—hundreds of thousands of people—dig a canal in the 1930s, and, unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the canal, but some 300,000 people froze to death digging it with spades and shovels in the middle of the Russian winter, and when it was finished, it was so shallow that none of the ships that were planned to go up and down it could use it.

But it got finished, even though it was the middle of the winter. This is from William Blake: "Oh Rose, thou art sick; the invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm hath found out thy bed of crimson joy; and His dark secret love does thy life destroy." This is another story from Solzhenitsyn about a women's camp.

He's standing in another camp, watching this occur because the women, of course, were put in a camp separate from the men: "Fire, fire! The branches crackle and the night wind of late autumn blows the flame of the bonfire back and forth. The compound is dark; I’m alone at the bonfire and I can bring it still some more carpenter shavings.

The compound that I'm in is a privileged one, so privileged that it is almost as if I were out in freedom. This is an island of paradise; this is the Marfino shashka, which was a scientific institute staffed with prisoners in its most privileged period. No one has overseen in me, calling me to a cell, chasing me away from the bonfire.

And even then, it is chilly in the penetrating wind, but she who has already been standing in the wind for hours—her arms straight down, her head drooping—weeping, then growing numb and still. And then again she begs piously, "Citizen Chief, please forgive me; I won't do it again."

The wind carries her moan to me, just as if she were moaning next to my ear. The Citizen Chief at the gatehouse fires up his stove and does not answer. This was the gatehouse of the camp next to us, from which workers came into our compound to lay water pipes and repair the old ramshackle seminary building across from me, beyond the artfully intertwined many-stranded barbed wire barricade.

And two steps away from the gatehouse, beneath a bright lantern, stood the punished girl—head hanging, the wind tugging at her gray work skirt, her feet growing numb from the cold, and a thin scarf over her head. It had been warm during the day when they had been digging a ditch on our territory.

Another girl slipped down into a ravine, crawled her way to the Vadino highway, and escaped. The guard had bungled, and Moscow city buses ran right along the highway. When they caught on, it was too late to catch her, so they raised the alarm.

A mean, dark major arrived and shouted that if they failed to catch the girl, the entire camp would be deprived of visits and parcels for a whole month because of her escape. The women brigadiers went into a rage, and they were all shouting—one of them in particular, who kept viciously rolling her eyes. "Oh, I hope they catch her, the [expletive]! I hope they take scissors and clip, clip, take off all of her hair in front of the lineup."

This wasn't something she had thought up for herself; this is the way they punished women in the Gulag. But the girl who was now standing outside the gatehouse in the cold had sighed and said, "Instead, at least she can have a good time out in freedom for all of us."

The jailer overheard what she said, and now she was being punished. Everyone else had been taken off to the camp, but she had been set outside there to stand at attention in front of the gatehouse.

This had been at 6:00 PM, and now it was 11:00 PM. She tried to shift from one foot to another, but the guard stuck out his head and shouted, "Stand at attention, or else it will be worse for you!" And now she was not moving, only weeping. "Forgive me, Citizen Chief; let me into the camp. I won't do it anymore."

But even in the camp, no one was about to say to her, "Alright, idiot, come on in." The reason they were keeping her out there anyways for so long was that the next day was Sunday, and she wouldn't be needed for work.

Such a straw blonde, naive, uneducated slip of a girl—she'd be imprisoned for some spool of thread. "What a dangerous thought you expressed there, little sister! They want to teach you a lesson for the rest of your life."

"Fire, fire! We fought the war, and we looked into the bonfires to see what kind of victory it would be." The wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire to that flame in you, girl. "I promise the whole world will read about you." This is from Milton: "Paradise Lost: For whence but from the author of all ill could spring so deep a malice to confound the race of mankind in one root, and Earth with hell to mingle and involve done all to spite the great Creator?"

What are the political implications of existential psychology? If you lie, you corrupt the system. If you lie enough, the system becomes so corrupt that it turns on you and becomes murderous. So the price of freedom, as far as the existentialists are concerned—and this is buttressed by the historical knowledge that they garnered during the 20th century—is that you have a moral obligation. You have a moral obligation to speak the truth to maintain the integrity of the state as well as fostering your own psychological integration.

We'll see you on Tuesday.