RE-BROADCAST - The Gulag Archipelago/One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn w/Jesan Sorrells

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3:01 that was three minutes. So that's it for me.

3:06 Out. Hello, my name is Hasan

3:10 Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

3:13 podcast, episode number 16 with

3:17 our book Today Our Author Today,

3:22 this Guy. Today we are going to

3:25 be reading insights and excerpts

3:29 that are the results or

3:33 that are about documenting the results of oppression,

3:37 suppression and the loss of the freedom

3:41 of speech. Sure, freedom was

3:45 restored, but as we have

3:48 as we wrap up the month, as we come to the end of a month

3:52 focused on writers of Russian descent,

3:56 where we have covered Lenin and Chekhov and

3:59 Dostoyevsky on the podcast, we've arrived

4:03 at the clearing at the end of the

4:06 totalitarian path. And

4:10 there in the clearing at the end of that path

4:14 stands a monumental giant of 20th

4:17 century literature. Whether you agree with his

4:21 conclusions or not, the anti

4:24 communist writer Alexander

4:27 Solzhenitsyn.

4:34 From the Gulag Archipelago.

4:38 That's what rest is. It's a blinding

4:42 flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly

4:45 into the past and the impossible into omnipotent

4:50 actuality. That's all.

4:54 And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able

4:57 to grasp anything else except that in your

5:01 desperation the fake circus moon will blink at you. It's a mistake.

5:05 They'll set things right. And everything which is

5:08 by now comprised in the traditional, even literary

5:12 image of an arrest will pile up and take shape not in your own

5:16 disordered memory, but in what our family and your

5:19 neighbors in your apartment remember

5:24 the sharp nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door,

5:28 the insolent entrance of the unwiped jackboots of the

5:32 unsleeping state security operatives,

5:36 the frightened and cowed civilians witness at their backs.

5:40 And what functions does this civilian witness serve? The

5:44 victim doesn't even dare think about it, and the operatives don't remember, but that's what

5:47 the regulations call for. And so he has to sit there all night long and

5:51 sign in the morning for the witness jerked from his bed. It is

5:54 torture too, to go out night after night to help arrest his own neighbors

5:58 and acquaintances. The

6:01 traditional image of arrest is also trembling hands packing for

6:05 the victim, a change of underwear, a piece of soap, something to

6:09 eat. And no one knows what it is that is needed, what is

6:12 permitted, what clothes are best to wear. And the security

6:16 agents keep interrupting and hurrying you. You don't need anything,

6:19 they'll feed you there. It's warm There it's all

6:23 lies. They keep hurrying you to

6:26 frighten you. The traditional

6:30 image of an arrest is also what

6:33 happens afterward, when the poor victim has been

6:37 taken away. It is an alien,

6:40 brutal and crushing force, totally dominating the

6:44 apartment for hours on end. A breaking, ripping

6:48 open, pulling from the walls, emptying things from wardrobes and desks

6:51 onto the floor, shaking, dumping out and ripping apart, piling up mountains of litter

6:55 on the floor, and the crunch of things being trampled beneath

6:58 jackboots. And nothing is sacred in the search.

7:02 During the rest of the locomotive engineer in Ocean, a

7:06 tiny coffin stood in his room containing the body of his newly

7:10 dead child. The

7:13 jurists dumped the child's body out of

7:17 the coffin and searched it. They shake sick people

7:20 out of their sick beds, and they unwind bandages to search beneath

7:24 them for those left behind after the

7:28 arrest. There is the long tail end of a wrecked and

7:32 devastated life, and the attempts to go and

7:35 deliver food parcels. But from all the windows,

7:39 the answer comes in barking voices. Nobody here by

7:43 that name. Never heard of him.

7:48 Yes, and in the worst days in Leningrad, it took

7:51 five days of standing in crowded lines just to get to that window.

7:56 And it may be only after half a year or a year that the arrested

8:00 person responds at all. Or else the answer

8:03 is tossed out, deprived of the right to correspond.

8:07 And that means, once and for all, no right to

8:11 correspondence. And that, almost

8:15 for certain, means has been

8:18 shot.

8:22 That's how we picture arrest

8:26 to ourselves.

8:35 Sam.

9:19 In the west in 2022,

9:23 shockingly enough, freedom of speech is on the ropes

9:28 everywhere you look. Speech is confused with

9:32 physical violence. Speech is confused with

9:35 intent. Speech is confused with

9:40 hurting my feelings.

9:43 And this is not the

9:47 legacy of the West. This is not

9:51 what people fought and died for in the West.

9:55 People fought and died in the west, and quite frankly in the east, for

9:58 the right to speak and the

10:02 responsibility to accept the consequences.

10:06 All of them, not just the ones we feel comfortable with, of

10:09 such speech. We can talk

10:13 about platforms and public squares versus private

10:17 all we want, but fundamentally, at the end of the day,

10:22 speech is really the only thing that we have.

10:25 And as a person who makes his living

10:28 talking, speech is very

10:32 valuable to me.

10:36 When we think about freedom of speech, we have to think about where the suppression

10:39 of that speech ultimately winds us up at, and it should

10:43 scare the living hell out of us. And I don't say that

10:47 lightly. There are consequences

10:50 to the suppression of free speech, and I don't care if you're a

10:54 soft totalitarian or a hardcore one. The

10:58 totalizing impact of Suppressing speech, the totalizing

11:01 impact of oppressing views you don't like

11:05 does have an impact on the future

11:11 on this podcast. While we are not political, we are about leadership.

11:15 And leadership does eventually intersect with politics and culture and

11:18 family and everything else, even creation itself, just

11:22 as speech does. Leaders need

11:26 to speak freely in order

11:29 to lead effectively.

11:34 Remember I said in the west, the freedom of speech is on the ropes. Well,

11:37 it's on the ropes for three reasons, and I've kind of gilded the

11:41 lily a little bit. I've kind of gleaned over them a little bit, but I

11:44 want to go in depth about all three of them. Freedom of speech

11:48 is on the ropes because freedom of speech is inherently socially unjust.

11:52 There is no room for social human

11:56 justice inside of the freedom of speech. As a matter of fact, that's a

12:00 construct that doesn't even exist.

12:04 The other reason freedom of speech is on the ropes is because it exposes

12:08 those in power, regardless of their ideologies,

12:12 who would seek to be our betters. It

12:15 exposes them to ridicule. I was. I was watching the

12:19 Adventures of Robin Hood, a ironically enough

12:23 Disney movie, the other day, and. And King John

12:27 was undone by freedom of speech.

12:30 As a matter of fact, the only way he could suppress the speech was by

12:34 locking everybody else who was speaking, all

12:38 the other animals anyway in prison, including

12:41 the rooster who was strumming

12:45 the bandolier. So free speech is inherently

12:48 socially unjust. It puts the people in power, regardless of

12:52 their ideology, in danger of being exposed as the

12:56 tyrants that they actually are. And finally, freedom of

12:59 speech exposes to the raw,

13:02 sanitizing light of day the contradictory

13:06 nature of systems of all types, but mostly of a

13:10 system, the current system we are living in, in 2022, that

13:13 promises material comfort, but that can

13:17 only really deliver genuine inequality.

13:21 And we don't like that. We don't like that at all.

13:26 If you're looking for a reason for why freedom of speech must exist beyond the

13:29 ones that I've just mentioned and why it must be robustly defended.

13:33 It's because if words lead to the hearer feeling

13:37 hurt, demoralized, or disempowered, it doesn't mean that

13:41 those words can be conflated with actual physical violence.

13:45 And I want to hit on that quite hard today,

13:49 because actual physical violence is what happens when you

13:52 seek to curb speech. And we will see that today

13:56 throughout not only our readings here, but also

14:00 through the observations of others who have written about

14:04 these readings that we're going to read on this podcast today.

14:10 Totalitarians and tyrants don't like to be critiqued.

14:14 And, and they have feelings, you know, they're, they're

14:18 people. They can be, they can be hurt, they can be wounded.

14:22 Yes, I'm at the top of the hierarchical ladder, but do I

14:25 not bleed? Do I not also hurt?

14:30 Well, yeah, you do. And you're the ideal. And because you're at

14:34 the top, well, we see your butt, all of us

14:37 below you. Freedom of speech encourages humility

14:42 in leaders. Fortunately

14:45 for us, there are books that you can still get, and I would

14:49 recommend buying them before you can't get them

14:53 anymore, that expose the outcomes of both

14:56 suppressing speech and they show the power of speech

15:00 unleashed, how it can completely and utterly

15:04 destroy totalitarian institutions if even

15:08 just a drop of it is allowed to exist, which is why

15:11 totalizing ideologies seek to curb it everywhere

15:15 they can. The best

15:19 of these kinds of books

15:22 include 1984 and Animal Farm, Brave New

15:26 World. But in the late 20th century, in the

15:30 late 20th century, the

15:34 Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

15:38 really was the drip of acid

15:42 that followed a first drip of acid one day

15:46 in the life of Ivan Denisovich that began

15:49 to slowly and surely

15:53 corrode away and eventually destroy the,

15:57 the totalizing ideal that Lenin

16:01 had created in his revolution

16:05 all those decades ago.

16:11 One other point about free speech that I want to make here before I go

16:14 and back it up with the rest of this podcast today. When leaders

16:18 seek to build a heaven on earth in the philosophical and

16:22 the theoretical and even in the rhetorical, they

16:26 usually wind up in the practical, building hell

16:29 instead. And then those same leaders

16:33 will dare to put up a sign, metaphorically and

16:37 rhetorically, designed to convince the

16:40 denizens trapped within their own

16:44 hells that they are in fact in

16:47 heaven. And all of these

16:51 lies need to be exposed

16:56 through free and unfettered speech.

17:21 Sam,

18:07 Back to the Gulag

18:10 Archipelago. The version that we are

18:14 going to be reading from today is the Perennial

18:18 Library version, a little bit different than the Vintage Classic

18:21 version. This version of the Gulag Archipelago

18:25 was published in by Harper

18:29 and Rowe Publishers back in the day

18:32 in 1973. So if you

18:36 have the edition most recently released by

18:39 Vintage Classics that has the introduction

18:44 from Dr. Jordan Peterson, an introduction that we will

18:48 be reading some selections from today, it may not match

18:52 the version that we've got. We have some interesting information here,

18:55 particularly in this book in, in chapter

18:59 two that we are going to be reading from today, the

19:02 chapter entitled the History. Let me pull off the

19:06 little thing here. The history of our Sewage

19:10 Disposal System. An

19:13 ironic title for a chapter in literature,

19:17 if there ever was one.

19:21 And I quote directly from the Gulag Archipelago from

19:24 1973. In compiling this list, the most difficult thing is

19:28 to begin partly because the further back into the decades one

19:32 goes, the fewer the eyewitnesses who are left and the therefore the light

19:35 of common knowledge has gone out and darkness has set in, and the written chronicles

19:39 either do not exist or are kept under Locke

19:43 and Key. Also, it is not entirely fair to

19:46 consider a single category the especially brutal years of the civil war

19:51 and the first years of peacetime, when mercy might

19:55 have been expected.

19:58 But even before there was any civil war, it could be seen that Russia, due

20:02 to the makeup of its population, was obviously not suited for any sort of

20:06 socialism whatsoever. It was totally

20:09 polluted. One of the first blows of the dictatorship was

20:13 directed against the cadets, the members of the Constitutional

20:16 Democratic Party. Under the Czar they had

20:20 constituted the most dangerous ranks of the revolution, and under the government of the proletariat,

20:24 they represented the most dangerous ranks of the reaction.

20:28 At the end of November 1917, on the occasion of the first

20:32 scheduled convening of the Constituent assembly, which did not take place,

20:36 the Cadet party was outlawed and arrests of its members

20:39 began. About the same time,

20:43 people associated with the alliance for the Constituent assembly and

20:47 the students enrolled in the soldiers universities were being

20:50 thrown in the jug.

20:54 Knowing the sense and spirit of the revolution, it is easy to guess that during

20:57 these months such central prisons as Kretsky in Petrograd and the

21:00 Buchiri in Moscow, and many, many provincial prisons like them were filled with

21:04 wealthy men, prominent public figures, generals and officers, as well

21:08 as the officials of ministries and of the state apparatus who refused

21:12 to carry out the orders of the new authority. One of the first

21:15 operations of the Cheka was to arrest the entire Committee

21:19 of the All Russian Union of Employees. By the way, the

21:23 Cheka. The Cheka is the nkvd, which would later

21:27 be called the kgb, which would much later

21:31 have a person working in it that you may know

21:35 by the name of Vladimir Putin.

21:42 Back to the history of our sewage disposal system.

21:46 One of the first circulars of the NKVD in December 1917

21:50 stated, quote, in the view of sabotage by officials,

21:54 use maximum initiative in localities, not excluding

21:57 confiscation, compulsion and arrests.

22:02 And even though V.I. lenin, at the end of 1917, in order to

22:05 establish, quote, unquote, strictly revolutionary order,

22:10 demanded, quote, merciless suppression of attempts at anarchy on the

22:13 part of drunkards, hooligans, counter revolutionaries and other persons,

22:17 in other words, Foresaw that drunkards and hooligans represented the principal

22:21 danger to the October Revolution, with counter revolutionaries

22:24 somewhere back in third place, he nonetheless put the problem more

22:28 broadly. In his essay how to organize the

22:31 competition, January 7th and 10th, 1918.

22:35 V.I. lenin proclaimed the common united purpose of purging the

22:39 Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects, unquote.

22:43 And under the term insects, he included not only all class

22:47 enemies, but also workers malingering at their

22:50 work. For example, the typesetters of the Petrograd Party

22:54 printing shops. That is what time

22:58 does. It is difficult for us nowadays to understand how workers would just

23:02 become dictators, were immediately inclined

23:06 to malinger at work they were doing for themselves.

23:10 And then again, in what block of a big city, in

23:14 what factory, in what village, are there not saboteurs who call themselves

23:17 intellectuals? True,

23:21 the forms of insect purging which Lenin conceived of in this

23:24 essay were most varied. In some places they would be placed

23:28 under arrest, in other places set to cleaning latrines. In some,

23:34 after having served their time in punishment cells, they would be handed yellow

23:37 tickets. In others,

23:40 parasites would be shot.

23:44 Elsewhere you could take your pick of imprisonment or punishment

23:48 at forced labor of the hardest kind.

23:52 Even though he perceived and suggested the basic directions punishment should

23:56 take, Vladimir Ilyich proposed that

24:00 communes and communities should compete to

24:04 find the best methods of

24:07 purging.

24:25 Sam.

25:02 There are different versions of the Gulag Archipelago.

25:06 I want to address this versions question right off the bat

25:10 or concern. If you're thinking about this as I. As we read

25:14 from these various versions and put things together, I want to address this because up

25:17 front, because this can be somewhat confusing and it can also

25:22 cause people to question the validity or the credibility of the argument that

25:25 Solzhenitsyn is making in the Gulag Archipelago. Not in One Day in the

25:29 Life of Ivan Denisovich that seems to be a pure manuscript,

25:33 but this version,

25:36 this book, seems to have struggled to get it right.

25:40 And I don't mean that Solzhenitsyn struggled to get it right. But

25:44 there's different versions because of the problems

25:48 that arise, because many on the political

25:52 left worldwide, they had

25:55 problems with Solzhenitsyn's assertions about the nature of

25:59 communism in the Soviet Union. And of

26:02 course they control, and still do in many

26:06 cases globally, the the dissemination of

26:10 culture, including literature, across the globe. And

26:13 so, because they couldn't confirm the things that Solzhenitsyn was

26:17 saying, they waited and they then

26:21 sought to counterbalance Solzhenitsyn's assertions

26:25 in his book the Gulag Archipelago against

26:28 what the KGB and other declassified documentation

26:32 about communism stated about the system In a post

26:36 1989 context, in the context we all live in

26:40 now. Now, the problem with

26:43 counterbalancing the the

26:46 unclassified documents with what Solzhenitsyn

26:50 saying that the problem there lies in the fact that

26:55 the entire dialectic of Marxism is

27:00 fundamentally and foundationally

27:03 founded in perpetual grievance and

27:06 extremely sophisticated manipulation

27:10 of language, which the common people

27:14 call lying. Marxism

27:17 is basically a lie. Actually, there's no basically to it. It is

27:21 a lie. And communism was built on the foundation of Marxism.

27:25 Did Marx get to some truth about the historical forces

27:29 that are between groups of people? Sure.

27:33 But even a wrong clock is right at least once a day.

27:37 That doesn't mean that it's right the rest of the time,

27:41 though. And so, in adopting this counterbalancing of

27:45 Solzhenitsyn public intellect, individuals of all

27:48 stripes on both the right and the left have sought to whittle

27:52 down Solzhenitsyn into something else.

27:56 However, there is a person who has chosen to take

28:00 Solzhenitsyn at his word and has looked at the

28:03 history of oppression and has chosen to

28:07 stare at the facts as they are and tell the

28:10 truth. And this would be the Canadian psychologist who

28:14 author, podcaster and public lecturer Dr. Jordan Peterson.

28:20 From Dr. Jordan Peterson, from the introduction to

28:23 the new version of the Gulag Archipelago, the vintage classics

28:27 version of the Gulag Archipelago, and I quote extensively,

28:31 it was Solzhenitsyn who demonstrated that the death of millions and the devastation of

28:35 many more were instead a direct

28:38 causal consequence of the philosophy. Worse,

28:42 perhaps, the theology driving the communist system,

28:47 the hypothetically egalitarian universalist doctrines of Karl

28:51 Marx contained hidden within them sufficient hatred,

28:54 resentment, envy and denial of individual culpability and

28:58 responsibility to produce nothing but poison and death

29:02 when manifested to the world.

29:05 For Marx, man was a member of a class, an economic

29:09 class, a group that and little more, and history

29:13 nothing but the battleground of classes of groups. His

29:16 admirers regarded and continue to regard Marx's doctrine as

29:20 one of compassion, moral by definition, virtuous by

29:23 fiat. Consider the working classes in all their

29:27 oppression and work forthrightly to free them. But

29:31 hate may well be a stronger and more compelling motivator than love.

29:35 In consequence, it took no time in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution for

29:39 solidarity with the common man and the apparently laudable demand for universal equality

29:43 to manifest its unarticulated and ever darkening shadow.

29:47 First came the most brutal indictment of the class enemy.

29:51 Then came the ever expanding definition of that enemy until every single person

29:54 in the entirety of the state found him or herself at risk of encapsulation within

29:58 that insatiable and devouring net.

30:02 The verdict delivered to those deemed at fault by those who

30:06 elevated themselves to the simultaneously held positions of judge, jury and

30:10 executioner. The necessity to eradicate the

30:13 victimizers, the oppressors, in toto without consideration

30:16 whatsoever for reactionary niceties such as individual

30:20 innocence. Let us

30:24 note as well, this outcome wasn't the result of the initially pristine Marxist

30:28 doctrine becoming corrupt over time, but something apparent and present at the very

30:32 beginning of the Soviet state itself.

30:35 Solzhenitsyn cites, for example, one Martin Latsis,

30:39 writing for the Newspaper Red Terror, November

30:42 1, 1918, quote, we are not fighting against

30:46 single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.

30:50 It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused

30:54 opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question

30:58 you should ask him is, what class does he belong to? What is his origin,

31:01 his education, his profession? These are the questions that will determine the fate of

31:04 the accused, such as the sense and essence of Red

31:08 Terror, unquote.

31:16 It is necessary to think when you read such a thing, to

31:19 meditate long and hard on the message. It is necessary to recognize, for

31:23 example, that the writer believed that it would be better to execute 10,000

31:27 potentially innocent individuals than to allow one poisonous member of the oppressor class to

31:30 remain free. It is equally necessary to pose the question,

31:34 who precisely belonged to that hypothetical entity, the bourgeoisie?

31:39 It is not as if the boundaries of such a category are self evident. There

31:43 are, therefore the mere perceiving,

31:46 they must be drawn. But where

31:49 exactly? And more importantly, by whom? Or by

31:53 what? If it's hate inscribing the lines instead of love,

31:57 they will inevitably be drawn so that the lowest, meanest, most cruel and useless

32:00 of the conceptual geographers will be justified in manifesting the

32:04 greatest possible evil and producing the greatest possible

32:07 misery. Members of the bourgeoisie, beyond all

32:11 redemption, they had to go as a matter of course. What of their wives,

32:15 children, even their grandchildren?

32:19 Off with their heads too. All were incorrigibly

32:23 corrupted by their class identity and their destruction, therefore ethically

32:27 necessitated. How convenient that the darkest

32:31 and direst of all possible motivations could be granted the highest

32:35 moral standing. That was as

32:39 true. That was as true. A marriage of heaven and

32:42 hell. What

32:46 values, what philosophical presumptions truly dominated

32:49 under such circumstances?

32:53 Was it a desire for brotherhood, dignity

32:57 and freedom from want? Not in the least. Not

33:00 given the outcome it was instead, and obviously the

33:04 murderous rage of hundreds of thousands of biblical

33:08 Cains, each looking to torture,

33:11 destroy and sacrifice their own private

33:15 ables. There is simply

33:19 no other manner of accounting

33:26 for the corpses.

34:28 The primacy of the importance of the

34:32 individual to be seen either by the nation

34:35 state or by the corporation, it matters

34:39 not, is the struggle of genuine

34:43 intentional leadership.

34:47 Leaders seek to bend the apparatus of a

34:50 truly ethical state, including the apparatus of a

34:54 nation state, right? It could be any state that they're in, could be the state

34:58 of their family, could be the state of their community, it could be the state

35:00 of their company, any state. They seek to bend the

35:03 apparatus of that state away from the work

35:07 of hiding, away from the individual. And

35:11 they seek to move, they seek to push. They seek to bend the

35:14 apparatus of the institution, the organization, the

35:18 systems that they are in toward acknowledging the

35:21 consequences of the responsibilities that the individual

35:25 carries. And this is a fundamental thing that is missing in Marxism. It's

35:29 a fundamental thing that is missing in Communism. It's a fundamental thing that is

35:33 missing underneath cries

35:36 for social media justice

35:40 rather than an acknowledgment of

35:43 individual responsibility.

35:47 When leaders don't do this work, when instead they follow the

35:51 crowd, when instead they, they do what the crowd wants,

35:57 that, that the acts of

36:01 moving the apparatus towards

36:05 actual individual justice become blocked, they become, they

36:09 become cordoned off. There's barriers, there's impasses.

36:13 And moving and ameliorating these blocks,

36:17 these impasses and these barriers becomes the true work of an

36:20 intentional leader. And of course, one of the biggest blocks, one of the

36:24 biggest barriers in

36:28 moving the inertia of a nation state away from

36:32 repression, towards, towards freedom and maintaining it

36:36 in the direction of actual freedom is this idea.

36:39 It is a big idea, but it is this idea of protecting

36:43 speech. Look, repression inside

36:47 of totalitarian systems isn't a bug, it's an actual

36:50 feature. And if you're too naive as a leader to believe

36:54 that, or you're too willing to only look at the

36:57 bright side of humanity and miss the dark side

37:01 entirely, you will always be taken by surprise by how dark

37:04 human beings can actually become.

37:09 Leaders must overcome laziness and willful blindness and

37:12 arrogance and a sense of entitlement in order to bend the arc of the

37:16 organization away from apathy, away from,

37:19 hey, can't we all just get along towards,

37:24 can't we all just take some responsibility?

37:29 And in order to do that, leadership requires a robust

37:32 social and public defense of free speech.

37:37 Now, there's a couple of points here I want you to Consider as you think

37:40 about this as a leader, as we turn towards one day in the life of

37:43 Ivan Denisovich for a fictionalized example of

37:47 what this repression practically looks like.

37:51 Leadership does require leaders to know where the line

37:55 of propriety is in speech and to be prepared to define that line clearly for

37:58 their followers. I'm not saying you can yell fire in a

38:02 crowded theater, and I'm not even saying that speech doesn't have consequences. Matter of fact,

38:06 I believe that speech does have consequences. But we socially

38:09 negotiate what those consequences are, and we all have to agree on the

38:13 deal. It's not that one extreme or another

38:17 extreme gets to set the tone for the conversation.

38:21 It is indeed the moderate middle that should

38:25 be in charge. And leadership requires the

38:28 ability to emotionally and psychologically address the

38:32 consequences of free speech. Look,

38:37 you probably can't have real equality and

38:41 you probably can't get to real equity

38:44 here in this world with these

38:48 fallen humans. But both the

38:52 theories of equity and equality have the same premise

38:56 at the bottom and in the basement. And it is a Marxian premise.

39:00 And it's this idea that man and man alone

39:05 can successfully adjudicate all matters of justice and

39:09 mercy without any guidance, without any

39:12 external boundaries placed on them by a

39:16 transcendent morality.

39:20 We talked about this in our podcast episode this month with

39:25 David Baumrucker in looking at the work of Fyodor

39:29 Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment, a book written,

39:33 oh gosh, well over, or not well over,

39:37 close to 100 years before 1 day in the life of Ivan

39:40 Denisovich came out. And just as Solzhenitsyn knew the Russian

39:44 people weren't ready for socialism, Dostoevsky knew the same thing.

39:49 He knew they weren't ready for a glorious revolution. He thought they needed

39:53 a Christian God before they needed

39:56 a Marxist humanistic

40:01 revolution. He thought they couldn't get there

40:04 from here. Potentially.

40:08 Potentially, he was right.

40:12 From one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich at five o' clock

40:16 that morning, reveal was sounded as usual.

40:20 Reveille sorry was sounded as usual by the blows of

40:24 a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters.

40:28 The intermittent sounds barely penetrated the window panes on which the

40:32 frost lay two fingers thick, and they ended almost as soon as

40:35 they'd begun. It was cold outside and the camp guard was reluctant to

40:39 go on beating out the revelry for long.

40:44 The clanging ceased, but everything outside still looked like the middle of the night.

40:47 When Ivan Denisovich Shukov got up to go to

40:51 the bucket, it was pitch dark except

40:55 for the yellow Light cast on the window by three lamps,

40:59 two in the outer zone, one inside the camp itself.

41:04 And no one came to unbolt the barracks door. There was no sound of the

41:07 barrack orderlies pushing a pole into place to lift the barrel of

41:10 excrement and carry it out.

41:14 Shukov never overslept reveille. He always got up at

41:18 once for the next 90 minutes until they assembled for work belonged to him,

41:21 not to the authorities. And any old timer could always earn a bit by

41:25 sewing a pair of mittens for someone out of an old sleeve lining,

41:29 or bringing some rich loafer in the squad, his drive a lanky right

41:32 up to his bunk so he wouldn't have to stumble barefoot round the heap of

41:36 boots looking for his own pair. Or going the

41:39 rounds of the warehouses offering to be of service, sweeping up this or fetching

41:43 that, or going to the mess hall to collect bowls from the tables and bring

41:46 them stacked to the dishwashers. You're sure to be

41:50 given something to eat there, though there were plenty of others at that game. More

41:54 than plenty. And what's worse, if you found a bowl with something left in it,

41:57 you could hardly resist licking it out. But Shukov had never

42:01 forgotten the words of his first squad leader, Kuzeomin,

42:05 a hard bitten prisoner who had already been in for 12 years by

42:09 1943, who told the newcomers just in

42:12 from the front as they sat beside a fire in a

42:16 desolate cutting in the forest,

42:21 here, men, we live by the law of the taiga, but even

42:24 here people manage to live. The ones that don't make it are

42:28 those who lick other men's leftovers, those who count on

42:32 doctors to pull them through, and those who squeal on their

42:36 buddies.

42:40 As for the preachers, he was wrong there. Those people were sure to

42:43 get through camp alright, only they were saving their own skin

42:47 at the expense of other people's blood.

42:53 Shukov always arose at revelry, but this day he didn't.

42:57 He had felt strange the evening before, feverish with

43:01 pains all over his body. He hadn't been able to get warm all

43:05 through the night. Even in his sleep, he had felt

43:09 at one moment that he was getting seriously ill, at another that he

43:12 was getting better. He had wished morning

43:16 would never come.

43:21 But the morning came as

43:25 usual,

43:48 Sam.

44:19 The morning came as usual.

44:25 There is justice, but not the kind of

44:29 cosmic dealing, not the kind

44:33 of cosmic reckoning that we

44:36 want in our hearts. The language of justice

44:40 employed by people who want justice for their enemies, but only mercy

44:44 for themselves, tends to cast a dark shadow

44:48 in light of the fact that the sun rises on the just

44:52 and the unjust alike.

44:56 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was released

45:00 before the Gulag Archipelago, as I mentioned previously, and it

45:04 landed like an atomic bomb in Russian culture and Soviet

45:07 culture after Khrushchev's equally shocking public

45:10 repudiation of Stalin's cult of personality at the

45:14 22nd Party Congress in the late 1950s,

45:18 early 1960s. This book

45:21 details a day in the life of a prisoner, Ivan Denisovich, in

45:25 a Gulag. It is raw, it is unfiltered, and it reflected

45:29 in an emotional way the experiences that Solzhenitsyn

45:33 had himself that were further fleshed out and

45:36 ID'd in the gulag Archipelago.

45:41 The book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich lays out to critique

45:45 the previously unmentionable.

45:49 And it lays out the results at a social contract level of a

45:52 fully realized totalizing vision of what an

45:56 organized culture where lies, fear and machinations

45:59 serve as the Marxist driven concrete underpinnings,

46:03 an utterly rotten superstructure.

46:10 When leaders think about Ivan Denisovich, we have to think

46:14 honestly about the results and the consequences of speech and what that gets

46:18 us. And the fact of the matter is,

46:22 leaders must have the willingness to die socially,

46:25 culturally. Yeah, that means getting canceled. Yes, that may

46:29 mean losing jobs. Yes, that may mean not having food

46:33 to put in your kid's mouth. Leaders have to have a

46:37 willingness to die to protect the word of truth, to

46:41 protect the ability to even say that truth.

46:46 But leaders also, concomitantly

46:50 or co. Commitmently, or however you want to frame it, leaders also must

46:53 have a willingness to extract the highest meaning from the words they

46:57 speak and then have the guts to speak those words and speak that

47:01 meaning out. Now, the kinds of

47:04 folks who don't like that, the kinds of folks who find that to be

47:08 threatening, are folks at an individual level who

47:11 are, as Dr. Peterson mentioned earlier,

47:15 at the lowest, most mean spirited point in

47:19 their own experience. They are experiencing jealousy, they are experiencing

47:22 rage, they are experiencing hatred. They are. They're not

47:26 experiencing love of any kind, although they may use the words

47:30 of love, they may use the words of justice, they may use the words of

47:33 mercy, but that's not what they actually mean.

47:39 Amateur tyrants do not possess a totalizing

47:42 vision other than the vision of totally

47:46 controlling other people and other people's

47:50 responses to them all the way down to the

47:54 social contract level. And in

47:58 case you think I'm crazy, think of the last person you

48:02 saw being yelled at for either wearing a mask

48:06 or not wearing a mask in public. During the last

48:09 two years,

48:14 back to one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich.

48:20 Ah, but not simply to report as usual to the authorities for the daily

48:23 assignment. Now this is after Shukov gets up and he's moving around the camp.

48:27 Zhukov remembered that this morning his fate hung in the balance. They wanted to

48:30 shift the 104th from the building shops to a new site. The socialist

48:34 way of life settlement. It lay in open country covered with

48:38 snowdrifts, and before anything else could be done there, they would have to dig holes

48:41 and put up posts and attach barbed wire to them, wire

48:44 themselves in so they wouldn't run away.

48:50 Only then would they start building. There

48:53 wouldn't be a warm corner for a whole month, not even a doghouse. And fires

48:57 were out of the question. There was nothing to build them with. Let your

49:01 work warm you up. That was your only salvation.

49:06 No wonder the squad leader looked so worried. That was his job, to elbow some

49:10 other squad, some bunch of suckers into the assignment instead of the

49:13 104th. Of course, with empty bands, you got nowhere.

49:17 You'd have to take a pound of salt pork to the senior official there, if

49:21 not a couple of pounds. There's never any harm in trying. So

49:24 why not have a go at the dispensary and get a few days off if

49:27 you can? After all, he did feel as though every limb was out

49:31 of joint. Now we're

49:34 gonna switch down a little bit. We're gonna move forward a little bit.

49:38 Shukov is now tasked with with performing a

49:43 task in the gulag. And. Well, it's, It's.

49:47 It goes directly to. Well, well, cleaning

49:50 sewage. The top

49:54 of the well was so thickly coated with ice that he only just managed to

49:57 slip the bucket into the hole. The rope hung stiff as a

50:01 ramrod. With numb hands, he

50:04 carried the dripping bucket back to the guard room and plunged his hands into the

50:07 water. It was felt warm. The

50:11 tartar was no longer there. The guards, there were four now stood in a

50:15 group. They'd given up their checkers and their nap and were arguing about how

50:19 much cereal they were going to get in January. Food was in short supply at

50:22 the settlement, and although rationing had long since come to an end, certain articles

50:26 were sold to them at a discount, which were not available to

50:30 the civilian inhabitants. Shut that door, you

50:34 scum. There's a draft, said one of the guards.

50:40 Now we're going to switch to the Gulag archipelago for just a moment.

50:44 And how is it the genuine religious believers survived in camp? As we

50:48 mentioned, more than once in the course of this book we have already mentioned

50:52 their self confident procession through the archipelago, a sort of silent

50:55 religious procession with invisible candles. How some among them were

50:59 moved down but were mowed down by machine guns and those next in line

51:03 continued their march, a

51:06 steadfastness unheard of in the 20th century

51:11 and it was not in the least for show. And there weren't any

51:15 declamations. Take some, Aunt Da Silas

51:18 Chamille, a round faced, calm and quite illiterate old woman.

51:22 The convoy guards called out to her, shamil, what is your article? And she

51:26 gently, good naturedly replied, why are you asking, my boy? It's all written down there.

51:29 I can't remember them all. She had a bouquet of sections

51:33 under Article 58 and we're going to talk about article Pause for just a moment.

51:36 We're going to Talk about Article 58 coming up here in just a few

51:40 moments. Back to the Gulag

51:43 Archipelago selection. Your term, Auntie Diocese

51:47 Auntie Dusia side She wasn't giving such

51:51 contradictory answers in order to annoy the convoy. In her own simple hearted way

51:54 she pondered this question. Her term. Did they really think it was

51:58 given to human beings to know their terms?

52:02 What term? Till God forgives my sins. Till

52:06 then I'll be serving time. You are

52:09 a silly, you silly. The convoy guards

52:13 laughed. Fifteen years you've got and you'll serve them all and

52:16 maybe some more besides. But

52:20 after two and a half years of her term had

52:24 passed, even though she had sent no petitions,

52:28 all of a sudden a piece of paper came release.

52:34 How could one not

52:37 envy those.

53:46 Leaders who oppose the power of

53:49 free speech, who are frightened by it?

53:53 Either they fail to understand, or they understand all too well

53:59 the totalizing nature of

54:03 a Creator. And they may indeed really be

54:06 in rebellion against that Creator. And that rebellion

54:10 exposes itself as an opposition to genuine

54:14 free speech. People of Christ,

54:19 people of the Christian religion who genuinely understand their

54:23 religion, understand this fact, although they may not

54:27 know how to articulate it. There's

54:30 something very basic built into Christianity that

54:34 demonstrates that God loves liberty and God

54:38 loves freedom and God loves

54:41 true speech. Let me quote directly from the

54:45 Book of Genesis in the event that you're not really buying this.

54:49 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now

54:52 the earth was formless and empty and darkness was over the

54:56 surface of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering

55:00 over the waters. And God

55:03 said, let there be light. And there was light.

55:07 God saw the light was good and he separated the light from the darkness.

55:11 God called the light day and the darkness he called night, and

55:15 there was evening and there was morning the first

55:18 day. You can go

55:22 back to Genesis and read the rest of it, and I'd recommend doing that in

55:25 the event that you haven't. Because the freedom to speak

55:29 is freedom from the Creator. The Creator is

55:32 pro liberty. The Creator is also pro

55:36 judgment, pro consequence, and pro mercy.

55:40 Freedom of speech requires leaders insisting on the

55:44 responsibility of individual people to form a society and a

55:47 culture from the words of the truths that they speak.

55:53 But very often when a society is taken over by a

55:56 totalitizing ideology, there are

56:00 rules and regulations and boundaries that are put around this speech

56:05 that stop it from occurring and that works in the

56:09 totalitarian tyrant's favor. You

56:13 know, the one who's in rebellion against creation

56:16 itself.

56:20 Back to the Gulag Archipelago the History of our Sewage

56:23 Disposal system from the 1973

56:27 Perennial Classics edition by Harper and Rowe

56:32 Paradoxically enough, every act of the all penetrating, eternally wakeful

56:36 organs over the span of many years is based solely on one

56:40 article of the 140 articles of the non general division of the criminal code of

56:43 1926. One can find more epithets in praise of

56:47 this article than Turgenev once assembled to praise the Russian language, or

56:50 Nekrasov to praise Mother Russia, great,

56:54 powerful, abundant, highly ramified, multi form, wide sweeping 58

56:58 which summed up the world not so much through the exact terms of

57:02 its sections as in their extended

57:05 dialectical interpretation.

57:09 Who among us has not experienced its all encompassing embrace?

57:12 In all truth there is no step, thought or action

57:16 or lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by

57:20 the heavy hand of Article 58. The article

57:24 itself could not be worded in such broad terms, but it proved it possible

57:27 to interpret it this broadly. Article 58

57:31 was not in that division of the Code dealing with the political crimes, and nowhere

57:35 was it categorized as political. No, it

57:39 was included with crimes against public order and the organized

57:42 gangsterism in division of crimes against the state.

57:47 Thus the Criminal Code starts off by refusing to recognize

57:50 anyone under its jurisdiction as a political offender.

57:54 All are simply criminals. Article

57:58 58 consisted of 14 sections.

58:03 In section 1 we learned that any action and according to article 6 of the

58:06 Criminal Code, any absence of action directed toward

58:10 the weakening of state power was considered to be counter

58:13 revolutionary. Broadly interpreted, this

58:17 turned out to include the refusal of a prisoner in camp to work when in

58:20 a state of starvation exhaustion.

58:24 This was a weakening of state power and it

58:28 was punished by execution,

58:32 for instance, the execution of malingerers during the war.

58:37 From 1934 on, when we were given back. The term motherland

58:41 subsections were inserted on Treason to the motherland. 1a, 1b,

58:45 1c, 1d. According to these new subsections, all actions directed

58:48 against the military might of the USSR were punishable by

58:52 execution, one battle or by 10 years imprisonment. 1a. But

58:55 the lighter penalty was imposed only when mitigating circumstances were present and

58:59 upon civilians only.

59:02 Broadly interpreted, when our soldiers were sentenced to only 10 years for

59:06 allowing themselves to be taken prisoner. Side note,

59:09 Solzhenitsyn had a little bit of trouble in the

59:13 Soviet military with the Germans. Back

59:17 to the book. Actions injurious to Soviet military might. This was

59:21 humanitarian to the point of being illegal.

59:25 According to the Stalinist Code, they should have been shot on their return home.

59:30 Here is another example of the broad interpretation. I remember well an

59:34 encounter in Bukiri in the summer of 1946. A certain

59:37 pole had been born in Lemberg, when that city was part of the Austro

59:41 Hungarian Empire. Until World War II he lived in his

59:45 native city, by then located in Poland. Then he went to Austria where he entered

59:48 the Service, and in 1945 he was arrested there by the Russians. Since

59:52 by this time Austrian Lemberg had become Ukrainian Lvov, he received

59:56 a tenor under Article 51 1A of the Ukrainian

1:00:00 Criminal Code, that is for treason to his motherland, the Ukraine.

1:00:05 And at his interrogation, the poor fellow couldn't prove that treason to the Ukraine

1:00:08 had not been his purpose when he went to Vienna.

1:00:13 And that's how he conned his way into becoming

1:00:17 a traitor. One

1:00:20 important additional broadening of the section on treason was its application via

1:00:24 Article 19 of the Criminal Code, via intent.

1:00:28 In other words, no treason had taken place, but the

1:00:32 interrogator envisioned an intention to

1:00:35 betray, and that was enough to justify a full term,

1:00:39 the same as for actual treason. True, Article 19

1:00:43 proposes that there be no penalty for intent, but

1:00:47 only for preparation. But given a dialectical

1:00:50 reading, one can understand intention as preparation.

1:00:54 And preparation is punished by the same way, that is with

1:00:58 the same penalty as the crime itself. In

1:01:01 general, we quote, we draw no distinction between intention and

1:01:05 the crime itself. And this is an instance of the

1:01:09 superiority of Soviet legislation to

1:01:13 bourgeoisie legislation.

1:01:38 Sam.

1:02:27 Tyranny inevitably arises

1:02:32 when the ideological purists of a totalizing

1:02:36 system turned their lidless all seeing

1:02:40 eye, as Sauron did in Lord of the Rings,

1:02:43 toward individuals who refused to go along. Like religious ones,

1:02:47 genuinely religious ones who refuse to get in line, like just

1:02:51 the rebellious no folks and those

1:02:54 folks who refuse to toe the line or who are

1:02:58 confused about where exactly the line is, because it keeps shifting.

1:03:03 This is again, not a bug of

1:03:07 tyranny. This is a feature

1:03:11 from Dr. Jordan Peterson's introduction to the Gulag Archipelago Vintage

1:03:15 Classics edition. And I quote,

1:03:19 is this not a, or even the essential point of difference between

1:03:23 the west, for all its faults, and the brutal, terrible

1:03:26 egalitarian systems generated by the pathological communist

1:03:30 doctrine? The great and good framers of the American

1:03:33 Republic were, for example, anything but utopian. They took full

1:03:37 stock and full measure of eradicable human imperfection. They

1:03:41 held modest goals derived not least from the profoundly

1:03:44 cautious common law tradition of England. They endeavored to establish

1:03:48 a system. The corrupt and ignorant fools we all are could not damage too

1:03:52 vainly. That's humility.

1:03:56 That's clear headed knowledge of the limitations of human machination and

1:04:00 good intention. But the communists, the

1:04:04 revolutionaries, they aimed gradually and admirably, at least in theory, at

1:04:08 a much more heavenly vision. And they began their pursuit with hypothetically

1:04:11 straightforward and oh so morally justifiable enforcement of economic

1:04:15 equality. Wealth, however, was not

1:04:19 so easily generated. The poor could not simply become

1:04:23 rich, but the riches of those who had anything more than the

1:04:26 greatest pauper, no matter how pitiful that more actually

1:04:30 was, that could be redistributed or at least

1:04:33 destroyed. That's equality too,

1:04:37 that sacrifice in the name of heaven on earth. And redistribution was not

1:04:41 enough. With all its theft, betrayal and death,

1:04:45 mere economic engineering was insufficient. What emerged as well was the

1:04:49 overarching and truly totalitarian desire, and to

1:04:52 remake man and woman as such, the

1:04:55 longing to restructure the human spirit in the very image

1:04:59 of communist preconceptions,

1:05:03 attributing to themselves this divine ability, this transcendent wisdom.

1:05:07 And with unshakable belief in the glowing but

1:05:10 ever receding future, the newly minted

1:05:14 Soviets tortured, thieved, imprisoned, lied and

1:05:18 betrayed, all the while masking their great evil with virtue.

1:05:23 From the Gulag Archipelago directly, and I quote from Aleksandr

1:05:27 Solzhenitsyn, this was the nub of the plan. The peasant's

1:05:31 seed must perish together with the adults. Since Herod

1:05:35 was no more. Only the vanguard doctrine has shown us how to destroy

1:05:38 utterly, down to the very babes. Hitler

1:05:42 was a mere disciple, but he had all the luck. His

1:05:46 murder camps have made him famous, whereas, and no one has any

1:05:49 interest in ours at all.

1:05:56 Social proofing is powerful when you can get everyone to go along with a

1:06:00 totalizing creed or a creed

1:06:03 based on liberty. Social proofing has power. And

1:06:07 this is what both the Founding Fathers knew and Karl Marx.

1:06:12 But the Founding Fathers knew something about human nature that Marx rejected

1:06:16 and Lenin found to be a fool's errand to even consider.

1:06:21 The founding fathers knew, and leaders have to know that words

1:06:25 at the individual level mean more than they do even at the nation

1:06:28 state level. But they also knew that leaders

1:06:32 use their words to challenge the frontiers of

1:06:35 social proofing. They use their words to put together a podcast like this and

1:06:39 read books like we've read during the month, and make arguments and

1:06:43 assertions like we've made during this month about these works,

1:06:47 and to comment on current cultural tropes and

1:06:50 trends without fear, without shaking, without

1:06:54 wavering, to plant a flag

1:06:58 and take a position. This is what leaders do.

1:07:02 They do it in their small businesses, they do it in their medium sized

1:07:06 entities. And even more importantly, leaders must do it in their

1:07:09 gigantic mega corporations where they all hang out

1:07:13 trying to build us a better world, one technological

1:07:16 gee whiz advancement at a time.

1:07:21 Leaders also use their words to defend the boundaries of propriety. And I'm

1:07:24 looking at you, cultural leaders.

1:07:29 If politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from

1:07:32 religion. And religion, well, religion is the actual

1:07:36 root of everything. But if you're rejecting that root, if you

1:07:40 don't even know if you have that root, or if you're in open rebellion

1:07:44 against that root, well, you're going to tear down

1:07:48 the boundaries, you're going to remove them, or you're going to pretend that they

1:07:51 never really existed anyway. And this is a fundamental

1:07:55 flaw in your speech. It's a lie,

1:07:59 and you need to stop. Because on the other

1:08:02 side of that lie is someone taking you very

1:08:06 seriously and listening to you very, very

1:08:09 closely. And someone who might be willing to

1:08:13 take your lie as a marching order to reinforce

1:08:17 or to support a resentment or an envy that they are nursing

1:08:21 in their heart.

1:08:25 Totalitarian leaders, whether benevolent or tyrannical,

1:08:28 rely on the power of your social proofing from your words. Leaders

1:08:32 to reinforce totalizing control.

1:08:36 They rely on it just like bread

1:08:40 relies on. On butter, if

1:08:43 you can get it.

1:09:06 Sam.

1:09:34 Back to one day in the life of Ivan

1:09:38 Denisovich. No sense in getting your

1:09:42 boots wet in the morning. Even if Shukov had

1:09:46 dashed back to his barracks, he would have found another pair to change into.

1:09:49 During eight years imprisonment, he had known various systems for allocating footwear.

1:09:53 They'd been times when he'd gone through the winter without Valenki at all, or leather

1:09:56 boots either, and had had to make shift

1:10:00 with rope sandals or a sort of galoshes made of

1:10:04 scraps of motor tires. Chetzeses they called them. After

1:10:07 the Chiabinsk tractor works, now the footwear

1:10:11 situation seemed better. In October, Shukov had received, thanks to Pavlo, who

1:10:15 he trailed to the warehouse, a pair of ordinary, hard, wearing leather

1:10:18 boots big enough for a double thickness of rags

1:10:22 inside. For a week he went about as though he'd been given a

1:10:26 birthday present, kicking his new heels. Then, in December,

1:10:29 the Valenki arrived and oh, wasn't life

1:10:33 wonderful? But some devil in the bookkeeper's

1:10:37 office had whispered in the commandant's ear that Valenki should be issued only to those

1:10:41 who surrendered their boots. It was against the rules for a prisoner to

1:10:44 possess two pairs of footwear at the same time, so Shukov had to

1:10:48 choose. Either he'd have to wear leather throughout the winter, or

1:10:52 surrender the boots and wear Valenki even in the thaw. He'd taken such good

1:10:56 care of his new boots, softening the leather with grease. Ah, nothing had been so

1:10:59 hard to part with in all his eight years in camps as that pair

1:11:03 of boots. They were tossed into a common

1:11:06 heap. Not a hope of finding your own pair in the

1:11:10 spring. Now Shukov knew what he

1:11:14 had to do. He dexterously pulled his feet out of

1:11:18 the Valenki, put the Valenki in a corner, stuffed his foot rags into

1:11:22 them. His spoon tinkled on the floor. Though he'd made himself ready for the guardhouse

1:11:25 in a hurry, he hadn't forgotten his spoon and barefoot,

1:11:29 sloshed the water right under the guards. Vilenky. Hey there,

1:11:33 you slob. Take it easy. One of the guards shouted, putting his feet on a

1:11:36 chair. Rice, another went on.

1:11:40 Rice is a different category. You can't compare cereal with rice.

1:11:44 How much water are you going to use? Idiot? Who on earth washes like that?

1:11:49 I'll never get a clean otherwise. Citizen Chief. It's thick with mud.

1:11:54 Didn't you ever watch your wife scrub the floor? Pig.

1:11:58 Shukov drew himself up, the rag dripping in

1:12:02 his hand. He smiled ingenuously, revealing the gaps

1:12:06 in his teeth, the result of a touch of scurvy at

1:12:09 OOST Ishima in 1943.

1:12:14 And what a touch it was. His exhausted stomach wouldn't hold

1:12:17 any kind of food, and his bowels could move nothing but a bloody fluid.

1:12:21 But now only a lisp remained from that old trouble.

1:12:26 I was taken away from my wife in 41, Citizen Chief.

1:12:30 I've forgotten what she was like.

1:12:43 Citizen Pig.

1:12:47 Idiot. I've forgotten

1:12:50 what she was like.

1:12:56 The ties that bind society together are woven together for the gossamer of

1:13:00 truth. No matter what you may think of that gossamer, it

1:13:04 does bind society together. And when that truth is

1:13:07 no longer protected or actively dismembered by those with the intent to

1:13:11 build a quote unquote better world, it doesn't take long for

1:13:15 man's inhumanity to man to appear in even the

1:13:18 most inhumane situations.

1:13:22 It also doesn't take long for those situations to morph into the actual hell

1:13:26 verbalized in insults, degradations, and bureaucratic apathy

1:13:30 that encourages leaders to stick with the totalizing lie

1:13:34 rather than break it and destroy it in favor of the

1:13:38 freeing absolute truth.

1:13:42 Leaders understand this, and leaders have the courage, and it

1:13:46 is a courageous act to break and

1:13:49 restrain the ties that bind with their language, their

1:13:53 speech and their words. They raise the alarm,

1:13:57 and they recognize when those ties are being cut,

1:14:00 and they identify who's doing the cutting very

1:14:04 clearly. And then they go about the process

1:14:07 of reweaving back the fabric not only of

1:14:11 the social contract, not only of the

1:14:15 society, not only of individual entities, but they go back to

1:14:18 reweaving the fabric of the social contract, the fabric

1:14:22 of life together itself. And they

1:14:25 take this role very, very

1:14:29 seriously, even, and especially

1:14:33 now, innocuous leaders in

1:14:37 innocuous places in the.

1:15:44 So why am I going on and on about this? Why am I

1:15:48 lecturing into the void? Why is there no guest on the podcast? Why do I

1:15:51 not have an Amen corner on this one?

1:15:57 Because quite frankly, I don't need it. And I want to be

1:16:00 unambiguously clear. I am pro free speech, and I don't care

1:16:04 if you're white or black. I don't care care who you sleep with or

1:16:07 where you are at about your gender. I don't care what country

1:16:11 you came from, and I don't care what ethnicity you have. I don't even

1:16:15 care what God you serve or choose not to serve. I don't

1:16:18 care. I am for untrammeled free speech. Now,

1:16:22 with that being said, I'm also for untrammeled

1:16:25 consequences for that speech. And by the way, those

1:16:29 consequences, as I've already previously said, must be

1:16:33 socially constructed. And that's what we

1:16:37 did in America. That was the American experience.

1:16:40 Gosh, up until probably about six years ago,

1:16:45 when everybody kind of just went crazy because a

1:16:49 guy with a bad haircut came down an escalator and said

1:16:53 he was running for president.

1:16:59 But we've been going crazy a little bit before that, and he was just a

1:17:02 symptom of a much larger disease.

1:17:06 And the disease is a loss of faith in the promise of

1:17:10 America, a loss of a belief in the Republic, a

1:17:14 decline of cultural confidence. And I've said this on other

1:17:17 podcasts in other places, but I'll say it on this one. Our

1:17:21 literature reflects our cultural confidence and our ability to

1:17:24 read literature and understand hard literature as leaders

1:17:28 reflects and shapes our ability to actually say

1:17:31 hard truths out loud and know what underpins them.

1:17:36 If you don't know what underpins your speech, you will abandon it in

1:17:40 a heartbeat for any ideologue that comes along. And I firmly

1:17:43 believe that. And by the way, the ideologue can be from the right

1:17:47 politically, or the ideologue can be from the left politically, but you will

1:17:51 abandon it, and you will abandon it in lies and betrayal. And

1:17:55 the abandonment won't start in the voting booth. The abandonment will start

1:17:58 in your home, in your school,

1:18:03 in your neighborhood.

1:18:08 How can innocuous leaders this is the other thing I'm worried about. How can

1:18:12 innocuous leaders in a modern Western culture,

1:18:16 surrounded by the disturbingly unserious and influenced

1:18:20 by the peculiarly lightweight, how can they avoid the path of

1:18:23 least resistance and do the actual hard things, walk the hard

1:18:27 path and do it in a way that will perhaps make them happy, but that

1:18:31 for sure will create a better world. In essence, how can leaders tell the

1:18:34 truth in a time of untruth and unseriousness?

1:18:39 You want to know why some training programs in some sensitive

1:18:42 areas like diversity and inclusion don't work?

1:18:47 They don't work because we're not telling the truth. We're

1:18:51 merely passing along ideologies. You

1:18:55 want to know why books and movies that

1:18:58 have cultural tropes shoehorned into them about what you should believe or what

1:19:02 you shouldn't believe? You want to know why those fail at the box office or

1:19:05 fail to pull ratings or fail to pull subscription numbers? Well, they fail because they

1:19:09 aren't telling the truth. The truth is

1:19:12 complicated and messy, but it is the truth.

1:19:18 And the truth of situations, the truth of life, the truth of

1:19:21 circumstances is multifaceted. It's not all one thing or

1:19:25 another. Everyone is neither hero nor villain. As a matter of fact,

1:19:29 Solzhenitsyn said, infamously enough, that

1:19:33 the line of good and evil passes through

1:19:36 each and every human heart. We are all

1:19:40 sinful, and we have all fallen short of the glory of God.

1:19:44 We are all our brother's keeper.

1:19:50 These are principles that I hold, and these principles

1:19:53 undergird this podcast, and these principles undergird the books that

1:19:57 we read on this podcast. I do not come

1:20:01 to this work from an unprincipled, wavering Cultural position.

1:20:05 I actually care very little about

1:20:08 that. I care very much though, about rock ribbed principles

1:20:12 and making sure that you all understand exactly where we stand

1:20:16 and where I stand over here. And

1:20:19 leaders, leaders have to be clear about where

1:20:23 they stand and where they stand and stay on the

1:20:27 path based on principles

1:20:31 rather than on temporarily held positions.

1:20:36 You want to stay on the path as a leader? Start saying

1:20:40 no. It's very simple. Just start

1:20:44 saying no to a lie that you know is a lie. And it doesn't have

1:20:47 to be a big lie, it doesn't have to be a medium sized lie.

1:20:51 Usually the lies you have to start saying no to are lies in your own

1:20:55 house, lies in your own business, lies in your own

1:20:58 relationships, lies in your own communities.

1:21:02 Say no to lies and say the truth.

1:21:07 That is true liberty and that

1:21:11 is true free speech.

1:21:14 Sure, the humorists and the politicians

1:21:18 may want to own that space, but it really begins the

1:21:22 ownership of that space and the protection of that space really begins with you.

1:21:29 And then there's the ever present now, right?

1:21:32 Staying on the path requires rational engagement with the ever present

1:21:36 now, as well as intentional preparation for the ever

1:21:39 arriving future. The future is coming,

1:21:43 no matter how you feel about, is

1:21:48 agnostic to your emotions, but it is not

1:21:51 agnostic to your preparing for it.

1:21:56 And so staying on the path requires that rational

1:22:00 engagement. And the only way you can rationally engage is if you have the freedom

1:22:04 to speak the truth, if you have the freedom to

1:22:07 not worry about being thrown into a

1:22:11 gulag for pointing out that the emperor, whether the

1:22:14 emperor is the emperor of Amazon or Walmart, or the

1:22:18 emperor of the United States or China, or the emperor of the

1:22:22 bank down the street and or the emperor of your family

1:22:25 pointing out that the emperor, wherever he may show up or

1:22:29 she may show up, pointing out that they are naked while

1:22:32 everyone else claims that they are clothed.

1:22:37 Staying on the path requires leaders to engage with ideas, words,

1:22:41 speech, and concepts that they might find to be

1:22:44 personally objectionable, but that

1:22:48 in principle must be aired to protect

1:22:52 one of the two types of diversity that really actually

1:22:55 do matter. And that's diversity of viewpoint.

1:23:00 And the second is diversity of mindset.

1:23:04 We all don't think alike, nor should we. We all

1:23:07 don't have the same viewpoint and nor should we. And we need the

1:23:11 freedom to air our viewpoints and air

1:23:15 our mindsets without fear of a

1:23:18 totalizing ideology clamping down on us.

1:23:25 Staying on the path means that leaders are emotionally and psychologically prepared for the

1:23:29 consequences of speech against the potential

1:23:32 totalizing power of the mob

1:23:38 and that's really what you're all afraid of, isn't it? You're afraid of the

1:23:41 mob. Well,

1:23:45 don't be.

1:23:49 The mob is fickle.

1:23:52 Julius Caesar found that out.

1:23:58 Leaders protect free speech

1:24:02 no matter where it shows up.

1:24:09 And that's it for me.

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1:26:45 well that's it for me

1:26:49 out.