great literary people have great things to say. Like Dostoevsky, his novels just absolutely flattened me. He's so brilliant, and I've never read anyone who takes moral questions so seriously. Like, for example, if you look at Crime and Punishment, which is a book I would highly recommend, Dostoevsky is the absolute model of a true intellectual. And I say that because in Crime and Punishment, for example, Dostoevsky has this character named Raskolnikov. He's a university student. Now, he's having a rough time because he's in Saint Petersburg and he doesn't have any money. And he lives in this tiny little room, which has basically a bunch of clothes on the bed that he can sleep in. And he's starving to death. He only has bread to eat. He's a law student, so he's having a rough time, you know, in St Petersburg. The end of the 19th century is kind of a rough place. So it's called Nicole.

had it pretty bad, and so he's half-starved and half-delirious. He's also very... his ideas are very adult because he's one of the first Russians who really considered themselves an atheist. Russia was a medieval Society until the late 1900s. He thinks he's a pretty educated guy, and he's pretty smart. And he is pretty smart, but he's like smart arrogant, not smart wise because he's 21. What the hell does he know? He doesn't know anything, but he's smart. And he's contemptuous of other people because he can probably be smarter than most of them, you know? And he confuses that without with knowing what's going on. He lives in this little horrible apartment, and he has a horrible landlady, and she really... like this is where Dostoevsky's a genius, like Raskolnikov hates his landline, and then Dostoevsky tells you why, and you think, well, yeah, I'd hate her too. So she's miserable. She owns a bunch...

of Apartments. She charges too much rent for them. She tortures all the people that rent from her in every possible way she can. The places are filthy. She doesn't provide any furniture. She hoards money and doesn't do anything with it, so she lives in absolute poverty and in filth. And she's a cruel person in every possible way. Plus, she has this niece who isn't very bright, you know, it's intellectually impaired, and she basically treats her like a slave. She's not doing anyone any good. And that's what's going on. And then he gets a letter from his mother, and his mother basically tells him that his sister is going to go marry this rich guy because she's in love with him, battle solve all of his monetary problems so he can keep going to law school. But he reads between the lines, and you know, he realizes pretty quickly that this like rich guy is a real like miserly scum rat, and he's going to treat his sister and his mother absolutely miserably. And his sister doesn't really

love him anyways. And the only reason she's marrying him so that risk all knockoff can go to so he's not very happy with that and fair enough you know you understand his motivation. So he's starving and he's full of these ideas also they're sort of meaty and atheistic ideas hit Russia really hard because it went from seriously Orthodox Christian in every possible way to unbelievably skeptical in one generation and it just it just fractured the society it's partly why communism became so absolutely attractive for the Russians. Riskolnikov is he's thinking these sort of superman-ish rationalistic ideas and he thinks well you know there's no evidence that there's any real moral hierarchy and you can easily make a case that the reason that people aren't really moral they're just cowardly and this is a nietzschean observation right most of what you call your morality isn't morality all it's just you're too afraid to do what you want and because

you're too Weasley to admit that you say that you don't do those things because you're moral. But it isn't true. You'd love to do them if you were brave enough. You just aren't. People misread that to say that what Nietzsche thought was that all morality was cowardice. That is, he thought that all cowardice masqueraded as morality. That's a whole different thing. So anyways recalls recalling the call just thinking about these things. And he's thinking, well, I could be a lawyer and I'd be a good one. I'd help people. I'd help the poor people, you know. And what the hell good is it for me to wander around starving like this? And it doesn't seem reasonable. And my sister's going to go basically prostitute herself for this rich guy and that sucks. And like there's my landlady and she's an absolutely reprehensible creature and everyone agrees. And she's old and worn out and it's like, and she has this person she keeps as a Slave. Oh, maybe I should just get rid of her.

what I love about that is that this happens almost all the time in universities. I would say, but really, between whenever you hear people who think they're smart have a discussion, what they generally do is they have an idea, and then they have an idea about the person who has a different idea. And the idea about the person who has a different idea is that their idea is stupid. And so, what they do is they produce a caricature of that person's idea, and then they blast it, and they think, Wow, I won that argument, which is really pathetic. It's a straw man argument. It's the sign of a weak mind. What you do if you really want to have an argument with someone is you help them. Like, let's say you're a right-winger and you're arguing with a left-winger, or you're a left-winger the right-winger. It's like you want to make their argument as magnificent as you possibly can, and then see if you can undermine it. That's what

you do because then you're getting somewhere. Like any straw man, enlightened Dostoevsky never does that. When he sets up two ideas to go to war, he embodies both sets of ideas in the most powerful characters he can imagine. So in The Brothers Karamazov, for example, the two protagonists, basically there's a bunch of them, but one is named Alyosha and the other is named Ivan. Alyosha is kind of an innocent guy, good guy fundamentally, a little on the naive side, religious but not in a way that he can defend. You know, it's more of a natural expression of spirit. And he's in a monastery and he's the follower of this famous monk. And, you know, he's kind of into Orthodox Christianity and his benevolent and sincere way. He's not much of an intellect. And Ivan, his older brother, like Ivan's got everything. He's good-looking, he's tall, I believe he's a soldier. Like he's an impressive guy, and he's got a viciously cutting intellect.

and he just tears eliosha apart every chance he gets across the whole book. And you know you can see two parts of Dostoevsky fighting it out in the book because part of Dostoevsky was highly spiritualized, not least because he was epileptic, and that often exaggerates spirituality, but also because he was like he was a deeply spiritual person and also a tremendous intellect. And so he was at War inside, and he put those parts of him out into these characters and let them just go at it, and it's brilliant. Ivan makes the best argument for atheism that's ever being written. It's a really powerful. Basically what he does is he talks about all these terrible things that were being done to children in Russia at the turn of the century back in the late 19 1800s. He talks about this one situation where the parents of this young girl locked her in a freezing Outhouse overnight, and she was crying and screaming, you know, and

telling them that she was sorry, and they just left her in there, and she froze to death, and it was like front-page news in Russia time I guess probably in Moscow or maybe in St. Petersburg. Dostoevsky lifted that argument, and he said to he had Ivan ask elioshas like, okay well this is the sort of thing God permits, he said, the whole damn world isn't worth that, the suffering of one child in a situation like that, how can you possibly see that something like that can exist and wand around with your bone-headed belief in a benevolent God what's up with you would you lock a girl in the Outhouse overnight and let her freeze if that meant that other people would be happy, and of course aliolocious says, well no I would never do that, and so Ivan tells them, well yeah you wouldn't do that but this God that you imagine exists would be perfectly pleased to let something like that occur, you know aliosha has no idea what to say about.

that and Ivan that you know. That's just the fragment of Ivan's argument. He's like punching at him like math. And I think the way Eliosha basically responds is by trying to live a good life. He can't argue Ivan's better at it than he is. And plus, there's this vicious strain of critical thinking about religion that's being wafted in from Western Europe. You know, there's 300 years of philosophical force behind it, and Ivan is its mouthpiece. It's like Eliosha and Russia itself is just blown apart by that. They have no defense against them. The bloody Western Europeans had 300 years to get used to it. The Russians had like 10 years, so it just fragmented them. And they were like waiting for the new Messiah, and they sure got one. And both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche prophesied about what would happen to Russia 40 years before it happened. That's bloody amazing to think that you could look that far in the future and actually get.

it right things didn't change quite as fast then as they are now, but it wasn't like the Victoria times were static. There were a lot of things going on, and so to get that right over four decades, it's those guys were in touch with something very deep that was going on underneath the substrat of of Western Civilization.

Why You Need To Read Fyodor Dostoevsky - Jordan Peterson Explains | Philosophy In Use

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