what am I now zero? What can I be tomorrow? I may rise from the dead and begin a new life. Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote on a great many themes: God, morality, philosophy, love, art, and more. But he was also a man of numerous self-admitted vices. He complained that he was unable to control his temper, struggled to stick to a consistent writing schedule, and suffered from a serious gambling addiction. This made him a master at exploring the human tendency to self-destruct, and this is explored most clearly in his fascinating and underrated novel The Gambler. Dostoevsky wrote this very work to pay off his own debts that he accrued from his frequent trips to the casino, and it is a brilliant study on the dark nature of addiction and the way we can start off with very noble ambitions yet quickly find ourselves staring into the jaws of hell. Get ready to learn how addiction can slowly control your life without you even noticing, why love and money struggle to mix, and how we can all become the

victims of our own pleasure systems as always. This is a very rich text, and I will be unable to cover every single theme or idea within, but I highly recommend that you give it a read for yourself to get your own interpretation. But let's start by looking at one of the most prominent themes in the novel: the idea that we are very poor judges of what will make us happy and how a misplaced faith in money can distort our most selfless urges. One, one, money, self-ignorance, and self-sabotage. In the New Testament, we famously find the phrase the love of money is the root of all evil. This aphorism was penned by St. Paul, who thought that to love money was invariably to turn our wills away from virtue and towards expedience. If you prize something higher than morality, which for Paul is equivalent to God's goodness, then you will by definition be willing to sacrifice your own principles for the sake of a quick buck. Not only did he think this was immoral, he also

thought that it was fundamentally self-destructive. Judas sold Jesus out to the Romans for 30 pieces of silver and traded his Eternal Soul for a Fool's Bounty. Dostoevski explores this idea from a very particular angle in The Gambler. He demonstrates the corrupting influence a desire for material wealth or social status can have on what he saw was the noblest of human Pursuits, love in particular. What the characters in The Gambler tend to truly desire is human connection and support, but this wish consistently gets perverted into a quest for ever higher piles of gold. The first half of the Gambler follows our protagonist Alexi as he serves as a tutor in the household of a general who is in turn betrothed to a beautiful young woman named Madame oiselle blanch. The general is set to inherit a great Fortune from his aunt, who is very elderly and will soon pass away, and he is well aware that blanch is only with him for this future Fortune. She

certainly loves money a hell of a lot more than she feels for the general, and this little touch of pecuniary interference ripples outwards to totally morph the dynamics the general has with his family. He begins to anticipate the death of his aunt with baited breath and essentially hopes that it will happen. Instead of considering his family with love or even just with respect, he begins to see them all as a means to the end of gaining wealth and eventually securing the hand of Madelle Blanch. His debts grow and grow as he struggles to keep up the veneer of his success, and he hopes and prays that his aunt will soon die so that he can be relieved of his material predicament. From an emotional perspective, this is a complete disaster. For a start, it completely ruins his relationship with his aunt. Though it's not implied that they were particularly close to begin with, by the end of the novel, she totally despises the old general. She realizes that she is just a means to get at her money and is deeply

offended as any of us would be. The General's behavior also alienates him from his beloved stepdaughter, Pina. What could have been a set of friendly familial bonds is torn apart by the General's obsession with money. Remember, what the general is ultimately after is human understanding and connection in the form of Madelle Blanch, yet now he is ripping his own family apart for the sake of money. It is the epitome of a self-destructive miscalculation. The general does not know what will make him happy and so is pursuing a phantom. Emanuel Kant famously said that we must not treat people merely as means to an end but at all times respect their position as rational agents with their own interests, thoughts, ideas, and perspectives. His reasons for arguing this are long and complicated and a little bit esoteric, but the general thrust of his thinking is supported by a lot of later thinkers who talk about the corrupting influence treating people as a means to an end has on our own emotional lives. Martin Bouar used to

speak of the unique relationship we have to a friend or a loved one when we are recognizing them as a genuine, a whole person, totally separate from ourselves, with their own inherent value, and when they are doing the same thing to us. For him, this total recognition of the other person as a complete, valuable, and meaningful agent is vital for all of the wonderful things that arise from connecting with other people. It is what helps us feel less alone, makes a relationship comforting and meaningful, and turns this person into a source of genuine value in our lives. I'm skimming over a lot of the details here, but importantly for Boar, none of this can happen if we are stuck seeing people as a means to an end. In this case, we are simply not able to form a connection with them because we are treating them as a tool, or to use his terminology, seeing them as an it rather than a thou. So, treating someone as a means to an end does not just harm the victim but also the person exploiting them, and this is

even more significant if, like the general, the specific thing we are searching for is human connection. We also see this form of self-sabotage embodied perfectly in Madame Oiselle Blanch herself. Towards the end of the novel, we find out that Blanch has a lover back in Paris whom she genuinely adores. She does not seem to be using him for anything but is instead genuinely fulfilled and happy in his company. However, her love of money and status, and her wish to use others to get that money and status, stands between the two of them ever properly being together. Initially, she chases the general before switching to Alexi when he unexpectedly comes into a large sum of money, before going back to the general again because of his high-status place in society. But all of this is preventing her from actually being with the person that she loves. She does not particularly value the relationships she has with the general or with Alexi since she is just using them. Many people who read The Gambler tend to demonize Blanch as she

is totally manipulative as a character. She makes everyone else a tool in keeping up her lavish lifestyle, but by the end of the story, it is clear that she is her own worst enemy and her most wretched victim. In her obsession with achieving her material desires, she has neglected and forgone the very relationship that might have made her happy. Just like the general, she is a poor judge of what will make her fulfilled, and in vain, she tries to fill the hole in her heart with extreme material wealth and so places happiness forever beyond her reach. Again, the message is clear: Are we so sure that we know what will make us happy, or have we become self-destructive through sheer ignorance? It is also in the relationship between the general and Madelle Blanch that Dovi plays a philosophical masterstroke because the general only falls into the habit of treating people as a means to an end because Blanch is encouraging him to do so and is demonstrating it by example. Here, Dovi is touching on one of his favorite themes.

how our ethical outlooks and decisions do not just have immediate effects but go on to influence how other people see and treat the world. According to Legend, when Dovi was a young man traveling to the city, he saw an officer beat the driver of a carriage, who then turned around and beat his horse. This would be formative in Dov's later views that we are all responsible for everyone else's sins. It only takes a tiny bit of corrupting influence to spread like a disease, twisting the outlooks of a community from charity and kindness to cruelty and self-interest, and the destructive effects of this are perfectly illustrated in how it keeps both the general and Blanch from happiness. The misguided belief in the importance not just of physical security but physical luxury sets them both on the path to despair. But next, I want to look more closely at the protagonist of the novel and what gambling can teach us about the nature of happiness. If you want to help me make more videos like this, then please consider subscribing to

my Channel or my patreon. The links are in the description to the honic roulette wheel. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus used to talk about the danger of craving more, more, and more pleasure. He thought that if we sought ever greater levels of thrill or ecstasy, we would inevitably begin to crave those heightened, unsustainable states. Since these are unachievable or self-destructive in the long term, this redirects our understandable quest for happiness towards the destination of misery. And we see Alexi go through this very arc in The Gambler. Alexi begins the novel with money troubles. He is a tutor working for the general, but he longs to be with Paulina, the general's stepdaughter. And in a fit of devotion, he vows to liberate Pina from her debts and achieve his fortune in one fell swoop. So he takes whatever money he has access to and goes down to the roulette wheels. Surprisingly, he actually wins. Not only that, but he keeps winning. And then he loses a bit, and then he wins again.

eventually, he ends the evening with 200,000 florens to his name, a practical fortune. He rushes to give 50,000 of them to Pina to pay off her debts, but pride gets the better of her, and she throws the money back in his face. She views this as Alexi trying to buy her, just like the general is trying to buy Madelle Blanch. We will touch on the relationship between Paulina and Alexi later, but the important thing to note is what this initial high does to Alexi's mind. It gets him completely hooked on gambling. He spends a few months attached to Manazel Blanch after this great success, but he seems completely disinterested the entire time. He does not hold much love for Blanch, and his life seems dull now compared to his victory. Surprisingly, he does not even cling to his money. He allows his fortune to be squandered, all the while talking of how he will travel to Frankfurt to play the casinos there instead. It is clear that Alexi is not that interested.

in Love or Money anymore but is rather searching for the next thing that will put his mind in that state of heady ecstasy he found at the roulette wheel winning spin after Spin and rejoicing at the thrill of his conquest. By the end of the novel, Alexi is penniless again and is gambling to survive. He is still chasing the excitement from all those months ago, and everything else in his life Fades into the background. He encounters an Old English friend of his, Mr. Ashley, who announces that Alexi's dreams have come true. Not only is Paulina in love with him, but she has also inherited a lot of money, and he likely only needs to fall into her arms to find everything he has ever wanted. In any other story, this would be a straightforward happy ending. Alexi is delivered from his sorry fate at the last moment by the power of love and can safely give up gambling now that his need to do so has totally evaporated. In effect, Alexi is presented with a

solution to all of his problems and a situation that he would have fantasized about at the beginning of the novel. Mr. Ashley lends him some money to either return to Russia or get to Pina in Switzerland, and yet at the end of the story, Alexi is still pondering whether he is going to use this money to get everything he has ever dreamed of achieving or if he will return to the roulette wheels the next day. Obviously, we know that the decision to return to gambling would be totally irrational and self-destructive, and so does he, and yet his mind begins to play tricks on him. He recalls how on previous occasions he had been left with barely a penny to his name and yet managed to win a huge sum because the odds happened to be in his favor that day. If he returned to Paulina now, it would be without dignity. He would be destitute and relying on her goodwill to survive. Is that a fitting proposition for a noble man? Certainly not. But if he could win big and return

to Paulina wealthy and refined. Well, that would be another thing entirely. Then he could face her as an equal. How much better would that be? And all he needs is good luck for this one evening. So why not? He could always try to make passage to Switzerland tomorrow instead. As dooi himself had a gambling addiction, this inner monologue is probably transcribed from his own self-sabotaging thoughts. And as a result, I think it provides a real insight into how habitual self-destructive behaviors can feel from a first-person perspective. Dostoevski paints Alexi's mind as essentially cleaved in two. On the one hand, he knows that what he is doing is both irrational and tantamount to self-harm. And yet, on the other, he can come up with a million reasons why this particular time is the exception. Of course, gambling for years on end would be a terrible idea, but one more day of playing roulette? Is that really so bad? And when the possibility of becoming rich overnight is on the table, how unreasonable is he really?

being from a mathematical perspective very unreasonable, but he can slowly turn his better nature around to serving his own downfall. One of the most prominent philosophers writing on addiction today is Hannah Picard, and in a recent paper, she argued that for some addicts, addiction can not only become a habitual compulsion but actually part of their identity. Someone can go beyond simply recognizing that they have a problem and begin to become attached to it. As it takes over more and more of their life, they begin to wonder what existence would even look like without it, and this further cements The Addictive Behavior. Whether Picard is right or wrong, in general, we see this process at work in Alexi. He is so attached to the image of himself walking out of the casino with gold flowing from his trousers that he cannot let go, even when the life of his dreams is laid out before him. This development of self-destructive habits to self-destructive identity is even reflected in the title of the novel. It is not called Alexi or gambling or the

danger of roulette. It is called The Gambler. In Alexis's own mind, he becomes synonymous with his compulsions, and in demonstrating this, Dostoevski paints the tragic arc such addictive behavior can take, from chasing a high to forming habits to becoming a pillar of Alexis's identity. Gambling begins to consume every layer of his mind until even the prospect of his beloved Paulina strikes him as less exciting than his next stake. Dostoevski provides a dark insight into the way compulsions can slowly possess us and how the perfectly human dream of wanting to be happy can be morphed into something fundamentally self-destructive. And this is not just a theoretical exercise for him; he is drawing from his own experiences of addiction. And however generalizable this is, the warning itself is well worth listening to. But next, I want to take a look at the specific nature of compulsive behaviors and how they can threaten the core of what Dostoevski thinks makes a meaningful and fulfilling human life. Three the

existential threat of compulsion. In the previous section, we focused mainly on the troubling emotional effects of compulsive or addictive behavior, but for Dov, this is only one side of the story. For him, the thing that turns compulsion from unpleasant to an existential nightmare is how it takes from us one of our key philosophical needs: a sense of personal freedom. In Notes From The Underground, the anti-heroic protagonist famously declares that if he were to live in a Utopia, he would become spiteful and bitter simply for the sake of reasserting his freedom to be self-destructive in the face of a perfect world. While this is partly meant to show the self-hating nature of the protagonist, it also reflects Dov's view of humanity's needs as a whole. For him, we require a sense of freedom and responsibility in order to be existentially fulfilled. Without that, we will begin to feel like prisoners in our own lives. Dov should know; he spent four years on a chain gang in the Siberian

Wilderness, in his view, a sense of powerlessness or lack of freedom inevitably comes with despair and self-destructive acts to reassert our own individual significance in a world that is ignoring us. And again, this is not just a theoretical exercise for him. Dostoevski had his freedom ripped away from him cruelly and suddenly and did not return to his former free life for many years. In Alexis's case, there is a cruel irony because his gambling is initially driven by a desire to be free and have power. He wants to help Pina and raise his station so he would be a suitable match for her. That is why he strode out onto the casino floor the day he won 200,000 Florence. He was made unfree by these games of money and social status, and the only way he saw to escape was at the roulette table. His initial willingness to gamble is driven by the same sort of rebellious urge that the underground man held. It's just that here, it's a lot more

understandable. It reflects a kind of powerlessness that many of us have. A lot of us may have been unable to achieve a great goal in life because of limitations in our money or social standing or health, and we may have dreamed of surpassing this. Gambling is one of the few avenues that promises us the chance to be rich in a matter of hours if only we would risk it all. It is the perfect bait for when we are attempting to regain a lost sense of power in our lives, and his victories do liberate Alexi from his physical constraints. When he was rich, he could achieve almost anything, or although still not the love of Paulina, but he inadvertently traded in a much deeper kind of freedom, his sovereignty over his own mind. Again, we see this theme of attempting to achieve liberation or happiness and yet ending up in misery or enslavement, and how some of the less savory aspects of our societies can push people into these behaviors. The idea of love thwarted by games of social status.

dates right back to Dov's first major novel, Poor Folk. The philosophy around compulsive behaviors themselves is a difficult topic, but a common theme is that compulsion seems to diminish moral responsibility in some way. To again draw on the work of Hannah Picard, she argues that we ought not to hold patterns of addictive or compulsive behavior as blameworthy, at least not to the same extent as we consider ordinary actions to be blameworthy. In some ways, this is a very compassionate thing. It jives very well with the medical model of addiction as a disease, and it means that our first instinct in a lot of cases is not to punish people but to try to help them, and this is often a more productive way forward. But Picard also points out that this kind of action can have a bitter aftertaste. With removing blame also comes removing responsibility from someone's actions, and we're then essentially treating them as if they are no longer free, no longer in control of themselves, and no longer a suitable

moral agent. As St. Augustine might say, we are now viewing them as enslaved to their own desires, and this is potentially quite a dehumanizing position to put someone in. It excludes them from the moral order, making them at least partly into objects. This was also pointed out by Michel Foucault, who criticized the way that we label people as mad and thus exclude them from the rest of humanity. So, there is an open philosophical challenge here about how to treat compulsive or addictive behaviors. How can we be kind, compassionate, and productive in our outlook towards these behaviors without removing someone from the moral fabric of society and not respecting them as an agent? This is still one of the great unsolved problems in the philosophy of both addiction and mental illness. Classically, for Dostoevsky, he is making both a social and philosophical point here. On the one hand, he makes a criticism of the kind of society that so greatly disempowers people that they turn their hopes to gambling to reclaim a sense of freedom and control. But on

the other. It warns us against trusting in these hopes for dooi. They are false friends, and in our quests to gain physical or social power and freedom, we may end up losing the most precious sort of power we have: the ability to be masters of ourselves and to bear responsibility for what we do. Again, he is drawing from personal experience here. As a gambling addict himself, he knew what it was like to make this fouy and bargain and the existential consequences of doing so. In his letters to his wife over this time period, he talks about the shame he felt at his addiction and the profound helplessness he felt at being unable to stop. It was like he had a core part of the functioning of his soul ripped away from him. In a telling conversation with Mr. Ashley, the Englishman reveals that he knows just how far gone Alexi is, and during the exchange, he says, I am certain that you've forgotten all your best impressions, your dreams, your most urgent desires. Now don't go further than pair.

and impair even his old friend does not know what to make of him and essentially dehumanizes him, treating him as totally out of control of his own behavior, crushed under the weight of his impulses. Through his desire for control and power, Alexi has become uncontrollable and powerless, his total self-destruction having perfectly understandable origins that many of us could relate to. And this yearning for more control stretches to the way the characters view the odds of gambling itself. Pretty much everyone at some point in the story comes up with a theory or an off-handed remark about how to control the roulette wheel or the cards. They have superstitions, study unevidenced betting patterns, all in the hope of controlling the uncontrollable and predicting the ungovernable. Part of what makes their predicament so enthralling, even to those of us without a history of gambling, is that this is in some ways a microcosm of what we do in our own everyday lives. We do not often stop to consider just how much of reality is totally out of our hands and

how much of our behavior is geared at trying to claw on to whatever control we have at any moment. The world has the power to completely destroy us, and there is nothing we could possibly do about it. Alexi's struggle is a tiny version of our own. We too are scrambling for what little power we can gain over a world that is so much bigger than us and has so much more influence over us than we will ever have on it. We are all unintentional gamblers, relying on the precarity of odds we could not possibly calculate. Alexi may be fictional, but his predicament is both real and pretty much universal. But finally, I want to touch upon a hopeful note in Doo's Nolla, and one that can give us a drop of comfort when we are in the depths of our own self-destructive tendencies. Four the eternal hope, one of the striking features of Dov's works after his release from Siberia is his simultaneous recognition that much of our lives are outside our control, yet his continual

affirmation that we are totally responsible for our choices. At first, this can seem like a cruel or twisted kind of philosophy. If I have not caused myself to end up in a given position, then what sort of responsibility could I possibly bear? My future choices are all made from the standpoint of this position, so is this not, as Nagel might put it, moral bad luck? However, for Dooi, this responsibility is not punitive. He does not think that we should be in constant self-abasement about whatever choices we've made, but rather that we should live in the constant recognition that it is in our power to redeem ourselves. In other words, no one is worth giving up on. This idea ultimately stems from Dostoevsky's strongly held Orthodox Christian faith. He believed that no one could ever be beyond redemption and that Christ could save anyone, even the gravest of sinners. But he also experienced this in his own life. He went from convict to national hero and eventually overcame his gambling addiction. In his own eyes, Dooi was a

prime example of someone who had grave sins but had managed to claw their way back into the fold. So, it is only fitting that at the end of the novel, Alexi is presented with this choice: go to Paulina or stay and gamble. In the closing pages of the book, we get a profound insight into so many of the mental patterns that keep us trapped in self-destructive cycles. They are troublingly familiar. As we said earlier, Alexi rationalizes that it will be better to return to Pina as a rich and successful man than a down-on-his-luck gambler. In his current state, Alexi finds himself intolerable and is ashamed to show himself to Paulina. However understandable this urge is, we could also recognize it as a classic case of pride. In the modern day, we are used to thinking of pride as mainly a form of self-aggrandizement. When we picture a proud person, we tend to imagine someone proclaiming themselves a great artist or

a visionary thinker with very little in the way of evidence to back this up. But this is somewhat stricter than the older understanding of pride, which included many more forms of distorted self-judgment, including the idea that we are fundamentally unworthy of love or redemption, that we have gone too far and there is no hope for us. The Church Father John Chrysostom taught that this form of complete and total despair is very close to a type of pride. After all, who are we to single ourselves out as the only person on Earth who could never be redeemed, never change our ways, and remain in a pitiful and self-destructive state forever? For these early Christian thinkers, this was just as much a form of narcissism as aspiring to be as great as God. And this form of pride is perfectly embodied in Alexi. He recognizes that he is in pretty dire straits, but rather than turn his back on the path that got him there, he thinks that the only way out is through. If he does not emerge

from this gambling endeavor as a success, then he will have to own up to his mistakes. But if he can somehow make it work, then he will never have to confess to anything at all. In other words, he sees only two options: either he is irredeemable or he keeps gambling. And this is a quintessentially prideful response in this early Christian way of thinking. It refuses to recognize the idea that we could still be worthy of love despite our mistakes. And it's clear that dooi disagrees with Alexis's premise. This is partly what Pina represents at the end of the novel. Alexi is given the chance to change his fate from the path of self-destruction, and the only thing that stops him is the inability to face the idea that he has made a mistake, but one that can be forgiven and redeemed if he were only to swallow his pride and let himself be embraced by an old friend. It is this note in particular that makes me reflect on my own life. Many of us would have

gone down self-destructive paths at one point or another, and Dostoevsky's novel shed some serious light on what makes us continue on them long after it is clear that they are making us miserable. Sometimes it is more immediately painful to admit to our own faulty decisions than to persist in familiar suffering, and sometimes we can trick ourselves into thinking that we are too far gone, that no one would love us anymore. It is a form of pride that does not even grant a drop of joy, and it can trap us in patterns of self-destructive behavior, tricking us into thinking that there is no such thing as hope. It seems strange to say, but one of the most difficult things to admit is that we are flawed people in need of patience, forgiveness, change, development, and redemption. But this does not make us unlovable or beyond hope. You don't have to be a Christian to recognize there's some value in this thought. I am an atheist, but I appreciate how Dostoevsky brings

out this tendency many of us have to see our mistakes as unforgettable and our flaws as irredeemable, and that sometimes this is the very thing preventing us from stopping, reflecting, changing course, and throwing ourselves at the feet of those that offer us kindness. This is one of my favorite themes in Dov's novels. Even as he writes at length about murderers or exploiters or people that chuck their lives away through endless self-destructive choices, he still draws our attention to the option of changing. He does not even promise that this will reap material benefits or feel particularly good, but for him, it is the first step to becoming a new person. He even ends Crime and Punishment by saying Raskolnikov is now a new man. We can only hope that Alexi the Gambler followed the same path. Whatever our own faults, Dovi wants us to know that we are never beyond forgiveness and never unworthy of mercy or love. It's a beautiful idea from someone famous for his dark and disturbing psychological narratives.

I hope that it can give you pause the next time you think that you are fundamentally and irreversibly broken. But closely intertwined with these ideas of forgiveness is Dov's philosophy of love. And luckily, I have a video on that right here. And stick around for more on thinking to improve your life.

Dostoevsky's Warning to the Self-Destructive

Dostoevsky's Warning to the Self-Destructive

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