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

0:00 Hello. Normally I put the ad reads at the back end of the podcast so that you can hear the good stuff and not have to listen to me shill pointlessly for two minutes. Just so you know, I do this intentionally in our production because even I object to commercials as much as the next podcast listener. However, at this moment I would ask that you indulge me because I've got a book coming out on April 30, 2022 on Amazon and I'd like you to go ahead and place your order right now. The book's title is 12 Rules for Leaders the foundation for Intentional Leadership, and it's a collection of 13 essays on leadership.

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3:06 Out. Hello, my name is Hasan Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 16 with our book Today Our Author Today,

3:22 this Guy. Today we are going to be reading insights and excerpts that are the results or that are about documenting the results of oppression, suppression and the loss of the freedom of speech. Sure, freedom was restored, but as we have as we wrap up the month, as we come to the end of a month focused on writers of Russian descent, where we have covered Lenin and Chekhov and Dostoyevsky on the podcast, we've arrived at the clearing at the end of the totalitarian path. And there in the clearing at the end of that path stands a monumental giant of 20th century literature.

4:19 Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, the anti communist writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

4:34 From the Gulag Archipelago.

4:38 That's what rest is. It's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality. That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able to grasp anything else except that in your desperation the fake circus moon will blink at you. It's a mistake. They'll set things right. And everything which is by now comprised in the traditional, even literary image of an arrest will pile up and take shape not in your own disordered memory, but in what our family and your neighbors in your apartment remember the sharp nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door, the insolent entrance of the unwiped jackboots of the unsleeping state security operatives, the frightened and cowed civilians witness at their backs.

5:40 And what functions does this civilian witness serve? The victim doesn't even dare think about it, and the operatives don't remember, but that's what the regulations call for. And so he has to sit there all night long and sign in the morning for the witness jerked from his bed. It is torture too, to go out night after night to help arrest his own neighbors and acquaintances. The traditional image of arrest is also trembling hands packing for the victim, a change of underwear, a piece of soap, something to eat.

6:09 And no one knows what it is that is needed, what is permitted, what clothes are best to wear. And the security agents keep interrupting and hurrying you. You don't need anything, they'll feed you there. It's warm There it's all lies. They keep hurrying you to frighten you. The traditional image of an arrest is also what happens afterward, when the poor victim has been taken away. It is an alien, brutal and crushing force, totally dominating the apartment for hours on end. A breaking, ripping open, pulling from the walls, emptying things from wardrobes and desks onto the floor, shaking, dumping out and ripping apart, piling up mountains of litter on the floor, and the crunch of things being trampled beneath jackboots.

6:59 And nothing is sacred in the search. During the rest of the locomotive engineer in Ocean, a tiny coffin stood in his room containing the body of his newly dead child. The jurists dumped the child's body out of the coffin and searched it. They shake sick people out of their sick beds, and they unwind bandages to search beneath them for those left behind after the arrest. There is the long tail end of a wrecked and devastated life, and the attempts to go and deliver food parcels. But from all the windows, the answer comes in barking voices.

7:42 Nobody here by that name. Never heard of him. Yes, and in the worst days in Leningrad, it took five days of standing in crowded lines just to get to that window. And it may be only after half a year or a year that the arrested person responds at all. Or else the answer is tossed out, deprived of the right to correspond. And that means, once and for all, no right to correspondence. And that, almost for certain, means has been shot.

8:22 That's how we picture arrest to ourselves.

8:35 Sam.

9:19 In the west in 2022, shockingly enough, freedom of speech is on the ropes everywhere you look. Speech is confused with physical violence. Speech is confused with intent. Speech is confused with hurting my feelings.

9:43 And this is not the legacy of the West. This is not what people fought and died for in the West. People fought and died in the west, and quite frankly in the east, for the right to speak and the responsibility to accept the consequences. All of them, not just the ones we feel comfortable with, of such speech. We can talk about platforms and public squares versus private all we want, but fundamentally, at the end of the day, speech is really the only thing that we have. And as a person who makes his living talking, speech is very valuable to me.

10:36 When we think about freedom of speech, we have to think about where the suppression of that speech ultimately winds us up at, and it should scare the living hell out of us. And I don't say that lightly. There are consequences to the suppression of free speech, and I don't care if you're a soft totalitarian or a hardcore one. The totalizing impact of Suppressing speech, the totalizing impact of oppressing views you don't like does have an impact on the future

11:11 on this podcast. While we are not political, we are about leadership. And leadership does eventually intersect with politics and culture and family and everything else, even creation itself, just as speech does. Leaders need to speak freely in order to lead effectively.

11:34 Remember I said in the west, the freedom of speech is on the ropes. Well, it's on the ropes for three reasons, and I've kind of gilded the lily a little bit. I've kind of gleaned over them a little bit, but I want to go in depth about all three of them. Freedom of speech is on the ropes because freedom of speech is inherently socially unjust. There is no room for social human justice inside of the freedom of speech. As a matter of fact, that's a construct that doesn't even exist.

12:04 The other reason freedom of speech is on the ropes is because it exposes those in power, regardless of their ideologies, who would seek to be our betters. It exposes them to ridicule. I was. I was watching the Adventures of Robin Hood, a ironically enough Disney movie, the other day, and. And King John was undone by freedom of speech. As a matter of fact, the only way he could suppress the speech was by locking everybody else who was speaking, all the other animals anyway in prison, including the rooster who was strumming the bandolier.

12:46 So free speech is inherently socially unjust. It puts the people in power, regardless of their ideology, in danger of being exposed as the tyrants that they actually are. And finally, freedom of speech exposes to the raw, sanitizing light of day the contradictory nature of systems of all types, but mostly of a system, the current system we are living in, in 2022, that promises material comfort, but that can only really deliver genuine inequality. 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 ones that I've just mentioned and why it must be robustly defended. It's because if words lead to the hearer feeling hurt, demoralized, or disempowered, it doesn't mean that those words can be conflated with actual physical violence. And I want to hit on that quite hard today, because actual physical violence is what happens when you seek to curb speech. And we will see that today throughout not only our readings here, but also through the observations of others who have written about these readings that we're going to read on this podcast today.

14:10 Totalitarians and tyrants don't like to be critiqued. And, and they have feelings, you know, they're, they're people. They can be, they can be hurt, they can be wounded. Yes, I'm at the top of the hierarchical ladder, but do I not bleed? Do I not also hurt? Well, yeah, you do. And you're the ideal. And because you're at the top, well, we see your butt, all of us below you. Freedom of speech encourages humility in leaders. Fortunately for us, there are books that you can still get, and I would recommend buying them before you can't get them anymore, that expose the outcomes of both suppressing speech and they show the power of speech unleashed, how it can completely and utterly destroy totalitarian institutions if even just a drop of it is allowed to exist, which is why totalizing ideologies seek to curb it everywhere they can.

15:17 The best of these kinds of books include 1984 and Animal Farm, Brave New World. But in the late 20th century, in the late 20th century, the Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn really was the drip of acid that followed a first drip of acid one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich that began to slowly and surely corrode away and eventually destroy the, the totalizing ideal that Lenin had created in his revolution all those decades ago.

16:11 One other point about free speech that I want to make here before I go and back it up with the rest of this podcast today. When leaders seek to build a heaven on earth in the philosophical and the theoretical and even in the rhetorical, they usually wind up in the practical, building hell instead. And then those same leaders will dare to put up a sign, metaphorically and rhetorically, designed to convince the denizens trapped within their own hells that they are in fact in heaven. And all of these lies need to be exposed through free and unfettered speech.

17:21 Sam,

18:07 Back to the Gulag Archipelago. The version that we are going to be reading from today is the Perennial Library version, a little bit different than the Vintage Classic version. This version of the Gulag Archipelago was published in by Harper and Rowe Publishers back in the day in 1973. So if you have the edition most recently released by Vintage Classics that has the introduction from Dr. Jordan Peterson, an introduction that we will be reading some selections from today, it may not match the version that we've got.

18:53 We have some interesting information here, particularly in this book in, in chapter two that we are going to be reading from today, the chapter entitled the History. Let me pull off the little thing here. The history of our Sewage Disposal System. An ironic title for a chapter in literature, if there ever was one. And I quote directly from the Gulag Archipelago from 1973. In compiling this list, the most difficult thing is to begin partly because the further back into the decades one goes, the fewer the eyewitnesses who are left and the therefore the light of common knowledge has gone out and darkness has set in, and the written chronicles either do not exist or are kept under Locke and Key.

19:43 Also, it is not entirely fair to consider a single category the especially brutal years of the civil war and the first years of peacetime, when mercy might have been expected.

19:58 But even before there was any civil war, it could be seen that Russia, due to the makeup of its population, was obviously not suited for any sort of socialism whatsoever. It was totally polluted. One of the first blows of the dictatorship was directed against the cadets, the members of the Constitutional Democratic Party. Under the Czar they had constituted the most dangerous ranks of the revolution, and under the government of the proletariat, they represented the most dangerous ranks of the reaction.

20:28 At the end of November 1917, on the occasion of the first scheduled convening of the Constituent assembly, which did not take place, the Cadet party was outlawed and arrests of its members began. About the same time, people associated with the alliance for the Constituent assembly and the students enrolled in the soldiers universities were being thrown in the jug.

20:54 Knowing the sense and spirit of the revolution, it is easy to guess that during these months such central prisons as Kretsky in Petrograd and the Buchiri in Moscow, and many, many provincial prisons like them were filled with wealthy men, prominent public figures, generals and officers, as well as the officials of ministries and of the state apparatus who refused to carry out the orders of the new authority. One of the first operations of the Cheka was to arrest the entire Committee of the All Russian Union of Employees.

21:22 By the way, the Cheka. The Cheka is the nkvd, which would later be called the kgb, which would much later have a person working in it that you may know by the name of Vladimir Putin.

21:42 Back to the history of our sewage disposal system. One of the first circulars of the NKVD in December 1917 stated, quote, in the view of sabotage by officials, use maximum initiative in localities, not excluding confiscation, compulsion and arrests. And even though V.I. lenin, at the end of 1917, in order to establish, quote, unquote, strictly revolutionary order, demanded, quote, merciless suppression of attempts at anarchy on the part of drunkards, hooligans, counter revolutionaries and other persons, in other words, Foresaw that drunkards and hooligans represented the principal danger to the October Revolution, with counter revolutionaries somewhere back in third place, he nonetheless put the problem more broadly.

22:28 In his essay how to organize the competition, January 7th and 10th, 1918. V.I. lenin proclaimed the common united purpose of purging the Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects, unquote. And under the term insects, he included not only all class enemies, but also workers malingering at their work. For example, the typesetters of the Petrograd Party printing shops. That is what time does. It is difficult for us nowadays to understand how workers would just become dictators, were immediately inclined to malinger at work they were doing for themselves.

23:10 And then again, in what block of a big city, in what factory, in what village, are there not saboteurs who call themselves intellectuals? True, the forms of insect purging which Lenin conceived of in this essay were most varied. In some places they would be placed under arrest, in other places set to cleaning latrines. In some, after having served their time in punishment cells, they would be handed yellow tickets. In others, parasites would be shot. Elsewhere you could take your pick of imprisonment or punishment at forced labor of the hardest kind.

23:52 Even though he perceived and suggested the basic directions punishment should take, Vladimir Ilyich proposed that communes and communities should compete to find the best methods of purging.

24:25 Sam.

25:02 There are different versions of the Gulag Archipelago. I want to address this versions question right off the bat or concern. If you're thinking about this as I. As we read from these various versions and put things together, I want to address this because up front, because this can be somewhat confusing and it can also cause people to question the validity or the credibility of the argument that Solzhenitsyn is making in the Gulag Archipelago. Not in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich that seems to be a pure manuscript, but this version, 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 there's different versions because of the problems that arise, because many on the political left worldwide, they had problems with Solzhenitsyn's assertions about the nature of communism in the Soviet Union. And of course they control, and still do in many cases globally, the the dissemination of culture, including literature, across the globe. And so, because they couldn't confirm the things that Solzhenitsyn was saying, they waited and they then sought to counterbalance Solzhenitsyn's assertions in his book the Gulag Archipelago against what the KGB and other declassified documentation about communism stated about the system In a post 1989 context, in the context we all live in now.

26:40 Now, the problem with counterbalancing the the unclassified documents with what Solzhenitsyn saying that the problem there lies in the fact that the entire dialectic of Marxism is fundamentally and foundationally founded in perpetual grievance and extremely sophisticated manipulation of language, which the common people call lying. Marxism is basically a lie. Actually, there's no basically to it. It is a lie. And communism was built on the foundation of Marxism. Did Marx get to some truth about the historical forces that are between groups of people?

27:32 Sure. But even a wrong clock is right at least once a day. That doesn't mean that it's right the rest of the time, though. And so, in adopting this counterbalancing of Solzhenitsyn public intellect, individuals of all stripes on both the right and the left have sought to whittle down Solzhenitsyn into something else. However, there is a person who has chosen to take Solzhenitsyn at his word and has looked at the history of oppression and has chosen to stare at the facts as they are and tell the truth.

28:11 And this would be the Canadian psychologist who author, podcaster and public lecturer Dr. Jordan Peterson. From Dr. Jordan Peterson, from the introduction to the new version of the Gulag Archipelago, the vintage classics version of the Gulag Archipelago, and I quote extensively, it was Solzhenitsyn who demonstrated that the death of millions and the devastation of many more were instead a direct causal consequence of the philosophy. Worse, perhaps, the theology driving the communist system, the hypothetically egalitarian universalist doctrines of Karl Marx contained hidden within them sufficient hatred, resentment, envy and denial of individual culpability and responsibility to produce nothing but poison and death when manifested to the world.

29:05 For Marx, man was a member of a class, an economic class, a group that and little more, and history nothing but the battleground of classes of groups. His admirers regarded and continue to regard Marx's doctrine as one of compassion, moral by definition, virtuous by fiat. Consider the working classes in all their oppression and work forthrightly to free them. But hate may well be a stronger and more compelling motivator than love. In consequence, it took no time in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution for solidarity with the common man and the apparently laudable demand for universal equality to manifest its unarticulated and ever darkening shadow.

29:47 First came the most brutal indictment of the class enemy. Then came the ever expanding definition of that enemy until every single person in the entirety of the state found him or herself at risk of encapsulation within that insatiable and devouring net. The verdict delivered to those deemed at fault by those who elevated themselves to the simultaneously held positions of judge, jury and executioner. The necessity to eradicate the victimizers, the oppressors, in toto without consideration whatsoever for reactionary niceties such as individual innocence.

30:22 Let us note as well, this outcome wasn't the result of the initially pristine Marxist doctrine becoming corrupt over time, but something apparent and present at the very beginning of the Soviet state itself. Solzhenitsyn cites, for example, one Martin Latsis, writing for the Newspaper Red Terror, November 1, 1918, quote, we are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action.

30:56 The first question you should ask him is, what class does he belong to? What is his origin, his education, his profession? These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused, such as the sense and essence of Red Terror, unquote.

31:16 It is necessary to think when you read such a thing, to meditate long and hard on the message. It is necessary to recognize, for example, that the writer believed that it would be better to execute 10,000 potentially innocent individuals than to allow one poisonous member of the oppressor class to remain free. It is equally necessary to pose the question, who precisely belonged to that hypothetical entity, the bourgeoisie? It is not as if the boundaries of such a category are self evident. There are, therefore the mere perceiving, they must be drawn.

31:48 But where exactly? And more importantly, by whom? Or by what? If it's hate inscribing the lines instead of love, they will inevitably be drawn so that the lowest, meanest, most cruel and useless of the conceptual geographers will be justified in manifesting the greatest possible evil and producing the greatest possible misery. Members of the bourgeoisie, beyond all redemption, they had to go as a matter of course. What of their wives, children, even their grandchildren? Off with their heads too.

32:21 All were incorrigibly corrupted by their class identity and their destruction, therefore ethically necessitated. How convenient that the darkest and direst of all possible motivations could be granted the highest moral standing. That was as true. That was as true. A marriage of heaven and hell. What values, what philosophical presumptions truly dominated under such circumstances? Was it a desire for brotherhood, dignity and freedom from want? Not in the least. Not given the outcome it was instead, and obviously the murderous rage of hundreds of thousands of biblical Cains, each looking to torture, destroy and sacrifice their own private ables.

33:16 There is simply no other manner of accounting

33:26 for the corpses.

34:28 The primacy of the importance of the individual to be seen either by the nation state or by the corporation, it matters not, is the struggle of genuine intentional leadership. Leaders seek to bend the apparatus of a truly ethical state, including the apparatus of a nation state, right? It could be any state that they're in, could be the state of their family, could be the state of their community, it could be the state of their company, any state. They seek to bend the apparatus of that state away from the work of hiding, away from the individual.

35:11 And they seek to move, they seek to push. They seek to bend the apparatus of the institution, the organization, the systems that they are in toward acknowledging the consequences of the responsibilities that the individual carries. And this is a fundamental thing that is missing in Marxism. It's a fundamental thing that is missing in Communism. It's a fundamental thing that is missing underneath cries for social media justice rather than an acknowledgment of individual responsibility.

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

35:57 that, that the acts of moving the apparatus towards actual individual justice become blocked, they become, they become cordoned off. There's barriers, there's impasses. And moving and ameliorating these blocks, these impasses and these barriers becomes the true work of an intentional leader. And of course, one of the biggest blocks, one of the biggest barriers in moving the inertia of a nation state away from repression, towards, towards freedom and maintaining it in the direction of actual freedom is this idea.

36:39 It is a big idea, but it is this idea of protecting speech. Look, repression inside of totalitarian systems isn't a bug, it's an actual feature. And if you're too naive as a leader to believe that, or you're too willing to only look at the bright side of humanity and miss the dark side entirely, you will always be taken by surprise by how dark human beings can actually become.

37:09 Leaders must overcome laziness and willful blindness and arrogance and a sense of entitlement in order to bend the arc of the organization away from apathy, away from, hey, can't we all just get along towards, can't we all just take some responsibility?

37:29 And in order to do that, leadership requires a robust social and public defense of free speech. Now, there's a couple of points here I want you to Consider as you think about this as a leader, as we turn towards one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich for a fictionalized example of what this repression practically looks like. Leadership does require leaders to know where the line of propriety is in speech and to be prepared to define that line clearly for their followers. I'm not saying you can yell fire in a crowded theater, and I'm not even saying that speech doesn't have consequences.

38:05 Matter of fact, I believe that speech does have consequences. But we socially negotiate what those consequences are, and we all have to agree on the deal. It's not that one extreme or another extreme gets to set the tone for the conversation. It is indeed the moderate middle that should be in charge. And leadership requires the ability to emotionally and psychologically address the consequences of free speech. Look,

38:37 you probably can't have real equality and you probably can't get to real equity here in this world with these fallen humans. But both the theories of equity and equality have the same premise at the bottom and in the basement. And it is a Marxian premise. And it's this idea that man and man alone can successfully adjudicate all matters of justice and mercy without any guidance, without any external boundaries placed on them by a transcendent morality.

39:20 We talked about this in our podcast episode this month with David Baumrucker in looking at the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment, a book written, oh gosh, well over, or not well over, close to 100 years before 1 day in the life of Ivan Denisovich came out. And just as Solzhenitsyn knew the Russian people weren't ready for socialism, Dostoevsky knew the same thing. He knew they weren't ready for a glorious revolution. He thought they needed a Christian God before they needed a Marxist humanistic revolution.

40:01 He thought they couldn't get there from here. Potentially. Potentially, he was right.

40:12 From one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich at five o' clock that morning, reveal was sounded as usual. Reveille sorry was sounded as usual by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters. The intermittent sounds barely penetrated the window panes on which the frost lay two fingers thick, and they ended almost as soon as they'd begun. It was cold outside and the camp guard was reluctant to go on beating out the revelry for long.

40:44 The clanging ceased, but everything outside still looked like the middle of the night. When Ivan Denisovich Shukov got up to go to the bucket, it was pitch dark except for the yellow Light cast on the window by three lamps, two in the outer zone, one inside the camp itself. And no one came to unbolt the barracks door. There was no sound of the barrack orderlies pushing a pole into place to lift the barrel of excrement and carry it out. Shukov never overslept reveille. He always got up at once for the next 90 minutes until they assembled for work belonged to him, not to the authorities.

41:23 And any old timer could always earn a bit by sewing a pair of mittens for someone out of an old sleeve lining, or bringing some rich loafer in the squad, his drive a lanky right up to his bunk so he wouldn't have to stumble barefoot round the heap of boots looking for his own pair. Or going the rounds of the warehouses offering to be of service, sweeping up this or fetching that, or going to the mess hall to collect bowls from the tables and bring them stacked to the dishwashers. You're sure to be given something to eat there, though there were plenty of others at that game.

41:54 More than plenty. And what's worse, if you found a bowl with something left in it, you could hardly resist licking it out. But Shukov had never forgotten the words of his first squad leader, Kuzeomin, a hard bitten prisoner who had already been in for 12 years by 1943, who told the newcomers just in from the front as they sat beside a fire in a desolate cutting in the forest,

42:21 here, men, we live by the law of the taiga, but even here people manage to live. The ones that don't make it are those who lick other men's leftovers, those who count on doctors to pull them through, and those who squeal on their buddies.

42:40 As for the preachers, he was wrong there. Those people were sure to get through camp alright, only they were saving their own skin at the expense of other people's blood.

42:53 Shukov always arose at revelry, but this day he didn't. He had felt strange the evening before, feverish with pains all over his body. He hadn't been able to get warm all through the night. Even in his sleep, he had felt at one moment that he was getting seriously ill, at another that he was getting better. He had wished morning would never come.

43:21 But the morning came as usual,

43:48 Sam.

44:19 The morning came as usual.

44:25 There is justice, but not the kind of cosmic dealing, not the kind of cosmic reckoning that we want in our hearts. The language of justice employed by people who want justice for their enemies, but only mercy for themselves, tends to cast a dark shadow in light of the fact that the sun rises on the just and the unjust alike. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was released before the Gulag Archipelago, as I mentioned previously, and it landed like an atomic bomb in Russian culture and Soviet culture after Khrushchev's equally shocking public repudiation of Stalin's cult of personality at the 22nd Party Congress in the late 1950s, early 1960s.

45:19 This book details a day in the life of a prisoner, Ivan Denisovich, in a Gulag. It is raw, it is unfiltered, and it reflected in an emotional way the experiences that Solzhenitsyn had himself that were further fleshed out and ID'd in the gulag Archipelago.

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

45:49 And it lays out the results at a social contract level of a fully realized totalizing vision of what an organized culture where lies, fear and machinations serve as the Marxist driven concrete underpinnings, an utterly rotten superstructure.

46:10 When leaders think about Ivan Denisovich, we have to think honestly about the results and the consequences of speech and what that gets us. And the fact of the matter is, leaders must have the willingness to die socially, culturally. Yeah, that means getting canceled. Yes, that may mean losing jobs. Yes, that may mean not having food to put in your kid's mouth. Leaders have to have a willingness to die to protect the word of truth, to protect the ability to even say that truth.

46:46 But leaders also, concomitantly or co. Commitmently, or however you want to frame it, leaders also must have a willingness to extract the highest meaning from the words they speak and then have the guts to speak those words and speak that meaning out. Now, the kinds of folks who don't like that, the kinds of folks who find that to be threatening, are folks at an individual level who are, as Dr. Peterson mentioned earlier, at the lowest, most mean spirited point in their own experience. They are experiencing jealousy, they are experiencing rage, they are experiencing hatred.

47:24 They are. They're not experiencing love of any kind, although they may use the words of love, they may use the words of justice, they may use the words of mercy, but that's not what they actually mean.

47:39 Amateur tyrants do not possess a totalizing vision other than the vision of totally controlling other people and other people's responses to them all the way down to the social contract level. And in case you think I'm crazy, think of the last person you saw being yelled at for either wearing a mask or not wearing a mask in public. During the last 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 assignment. Now this is after Shukov gets up and he's moving around the camp. Zhukov remembered that this morning his fate hung in the balance. They wanted to shift the 104th from the building shops to a new site. The socialist way of life settlement. It lay in open country covered with snowdrifts, and before anything else could be done there, they would have to dig holes and put up posts and attach barbed wire to them, wire themselves in so they wouldn't run away.

48:50 Only then would they start building. There wouldn't be a warm corner for a whole month, not even a doghouse. And fires were out of the question. There was nothing to build them with. Let your work warm you up. That was your only salvation. No wonder the squad leader looked so worried. That was his job, to elbow some other squad, some bunch of suckers into the assignment instead of the 104th. Of course, with empty bands, you got nowhere. You'd have to take a pound of salt pork to the senior official there, if not a couple of pounds.

49:22 There's never any harm in trying. So why not have a go at the dispensary and get a few days off if you can? After all, he did feel as though every limb was out of joint. Now we're gonna switch down a little bit. We're gonna move forward a little bit. Shukov is now tasked with with performing a task in the gulag. And. Well, it's, It's. It goes directly to. Well, well, cleaning sewage. The top of the well was so thickly coated with ice that he only just managed to slip the bucket into the hole. The rope hung stiff as a ramrod.

50:01 With numb hands, he carried the dripping bucket back to the guard room and plunged his hands into the water. It was felt warm. The tartar was no longer there. The guards, there were four now stood in a group. They'd given up their checkers and their nap and were arguing about how much cereal they were going to get in January. Food was in short supply at the settlement, and although rationing had long since come to an end, certain articles were sold to them at a discount, which were not available to the civilian inhabitants.

50:32 Shut that door, you 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. And how is it the genuine religious believers survived in camp? As we mentioned, more than once in the course of this book we have already mentioned their self confident procession through the archipelago, a sort of silent religious procession with invisible candles. How some among them were moved down but were mowed down by machine guns and those next in line continued their march, a steadfastness unheard of in the 20th century and it was not in the least for show.

51:13 And there weren't any declamations. Take some, Aunt Da Silas Chamille, a round faced, calm and quite illiterate old woman. The convoy guards called out to her, shamil, what is your article? And she gently, good naturedly replied, why are you asking, my boy? It's all written down there. I can't remember them all. She had a bouquet of sections under Article 58 and we're going to talk about article Pause for just a moment. We're going to Talk about Article 58 coming up here in just a few moments. Back to the Gulag Archipelago selection.

51:45 Your term, Auntie Diocese Auntie Dusia side She wasn't giving such contradictory answers in order to annoy the convoy. In her own simple hearted way she pondered this question. Her term. Did they really think it was given to human beings to know their terms? What term? Till God forgives my sins. Till then I'll be serving time. You are a silly, you silly. The convoy guards laughed. Fifteen years you've got and you'll serve them all and maybe some more besides. But after two and a half years of her term had passed, even though she had sent no petitions, all of a sudden a piece of paper came release.

52:34 How could one not envy those.

53:46 Leaders who oppose the power of free speech, who are frightened by it? Either they fail to understand, or they understand all too well

53:59 the totalizing nature of a Creator. And they may indeed really be in rebellion against that Creator. And that rebellion exposes itself as an opposition to genuine free speech. People of Christ, people of the Christian religion who genuinely understand their religion, understand this fact, although they may not know how to articulate it. There's something very basic built into Christianity that demonstrates that God loves liberty and God loves freedom and God loves true speech. Let me quote directly from the 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 the earth was formless and empty and darkness was over the surface of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, let there be light. And there was light. God saw the light was good and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day and the darkness he called night, and there was evening and there was morning the first day. You can go back to Genesis and read the rest of it, and I'd recommend doing that in the event that you haven't.

55:26 Because the freedom to speak is freedom from the Creator. The Creator is pro liberty. The Creator is also pro judgment, pro consequence, and pro mercy. Freedom of speech requires leaders insisting on the responsibility of individual people to form a society and a culture from the words of the truths that they speak. But very often when a society is taken over by a totalitizing ideology, there are rules and regulations and boundaries that are put around this speech that stop it from occurring and that works in the totalitarian tyrant's favor.

56:12 You know, the one who's in rebellion against creation itself.

56:20 Back to the Gulag Archipelago the History of our Sewage Disposal system from the 1973 Perennial Classics edition by Harper and Rowe Paradoxically enough, every act of the all penetrating, eternally wakeful organs over the span of many years is based solely on one article of the 140 articles of the non general division of the criminal code of 1926. One can find more epithets in praise of this article than Turgenev once assembled to praise the Russian language, or Nekrasov to praise Mother Russia, great, powerful, abundant, highly ramified, multi form, wide sweeping 58 which summed up the world not so much through the exact terms of its sections as in their extended dialectical interpretation.

57:09 Who among us has not experienced its all encompassing embrace? In all truth there is no step, thought or action or lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58. The article itself could not be worded in such broad terms, but it proved it possible to interpret it this broadly. Article 58 was not in that division of the Code dealing with the political crimes, and nowhere was it categorized as political. No, it was included with crimes against public order and the organized gangsterism in division of crimes against the state.

57:47 Thus the Criminal Code starts off by refusing to recognize anyone under its jurisdiction as a political offender. All are simply criminals. Article 58 consisted of 14 sections. In section 1 we learned that any action and according to article 6 of the Criminal Code, any absence of action directed toward the weakening of state power was considered to be counter revolutionary. Broadly interpreted, this turned out to include the refusal of a prisoner in camp to work when in a state of starvation exhaustion.

58:24 This was a weakening of state power and it was punished by execution, for instance, the execution of malingerers during the war. From 1934 on, when we were given back. The term motherland subsections were inserted on Treason to the motherland. 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d. According to these new subsections, all actions directed against the military might of the USSR were punishable by execution, one battle or by 10 years imprisonment. 1a. But the lighter penalty was imposed only when mitigating circumstances were present and upon civilians only.

59:02 Broadly interpreted, when our soldiers were sentenced to only 10 years for allowing themselves to be taken prisoner. Side note, Solzhenitsyn had a little bit of trouble in the Soviet military with the Germans. Back to the book. Actions injurious to Soviet military might. This was humanitarian to the point of being illegal. According to the Stalinist Code, they should have been shot on their return home. Here is another example of the broad interpretation. I remember well an encounter in Bukiri in the summer of 1946.

59:37 A certain pole had been born in Lemberg, when that city was part of the Austro Hungarian Empire. Until World War II he lived in his native city, by then located in Poland. Then he went to Austria where he entered the Service, and in 1945 he was arrested there by the Russians. Since by this time Austrian Lemberg had become Ukrainian Lvov, he received a tenor under Article 51 1A of the Ukrainian Criminal Code, that is for treason to his motherland, the Ukraine. And at his interrogation, the poor fellow couldn't prove that treason to the Ukraine had not been his purpose when he went to Vienna.

1:00:13 And that's how he conned his way into becoming a traitor. One important additional broadening of the section on treason was its application via Article 19 of the Criminal Code, via intent. In other words, no treason had taken place, but the interrogator envisioned an intention to betray, and that was enough to justify a full term, the same as for actual treason. True, Article 19 proposes that there be no penalty for intent, but only for preparation. But given a dialectical reading, one can understand intention as preparation.

1:00:54 And preparation is punished by the same way, that is with the same penalty as the crime itself. In general, we quote, we draw no distinction between intention and the crime itself. And this is an instance of the superiority of Soviet legislation to bourgeoisie legislation.

1:01:38 Sam.

1:02:27 Tyranny inevitably arises when the ideological purists of a totalizing system turned their lidless all seeing eye, as Sauron did in Lord of the Rings, toward individuals who refused to go along. Like religious ones, genuinely religious ones who refuse to get in line, like just the rebellious no folks and those folks who refuse to toe the line or who are confused about where exactly the line is, because it keeps shifting.

1:03:03 This is again, not a bug of tyranny. This is a feature from Dr. Jordan Peterson's introduction to the Gulag Archipelago Vintage Classics edition. And I quote, is this not a, or even the essential point of difference between the west, for all its faults, and the brutal, terrible egalitarian systems generated by the pathological communist doctrine? The great and good framers of the American Republic were, for example, anything but utopian. They took full stock and full measure of eradicable human imperfection.

1:03:40 They held modest goals derived not least from the profoundly cautious common law tradition of England. They endeavored to establish a system. The corrupt and ignorant fools we all are could not damage too vainly. That's humility. That's clear headed knowledge of the limitations of human machination and good intention. But the communists, the revolutionaries, they aimed gradually and admirably, at least in theory, at a much more heavenly vision. And they began their pursuit with hypothetically straightforward and oh so morally justifiable enforcement of economic equality.

1:04:16 Wealth, however, was not so easily generated. The poor could not simply become rich, but the riches of those who had anything more than the greatest pauper, no matter how pitiful that more actually was, that could be redistributed or at least destroyed. That's equality too, that sacrifice in the name of heaven on earth. And redistribution was not enough. With all its theft, betrayal and death, mere economic engineering was insufficient. What emerged as well was the overarching and truly totalitarian desire, and to remake man and woman as such, the longing to restructure the human spirit in the very image of communist preconceptions, attributing to themselves this divine ability, this transcendent wisdom.

1:05:07 And with unshakable belief in the glowing but ever receding future, the newly minted Soviets tortured, thieved, imprisoned, lied and betrayed, all the while masking their great evil with virtue. From the Gulag Archipelago directly, and I quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, this was the nub of the plan. The peasant's seed must perish together with the adults. Since Herod was no more. Only the vanguard doctrine has shown us how to destroy utterly, down to the very babes. Hitler was a mere disciple, but he had all the luck.

1:05:45 His murder camps have made him famous, whereas, and no one has any interest in ours at all.

1:05:56 Social proofing is powerful when you can get everyone to go along with a totalizing creed or a creed based on liberty. Social proofing has power. And 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 and Lenin found to be a fool's errand to even consider. The founding fathers knew, and leaders have to know that words at the individual level mean more than they do even at the nation state level. But they also knew that leaders use their words to challenge the frontiers of social proofing. They use their words to put together a podcast like this and read books like we've read during the month, and make arguments and assertions like we've made during this month about these works, and to comment on current cultural tropes and trends without fear, without shaking, without wavering, to plant a flag and take a position.

1:07:00 This is what leaders do. They do it in their small businesses, they do it in their medium sized entities. And even more importantly, leaders must do it in their gigantic mega corporations where they all hang out trying to build us a better world, one technological gee whiz advancement at a time.

1:07:21 Leaders also use their words to defend the boundaries of propriety. And I'm looking at you, cultural leaders.

1:07:29 If politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from religion. And religion, well, religion is the actual root of everything. But if you're rejecting that root, if you don't even know if you have that root, or if you're in open rebellion against that root, well, you're going to tear down the boundaries, you're going to remove them, or you're going to pretend that they never really existed anyway. And this is a fundamental flaw in your speech. It's a lie, and you need to stop. Because on the other side of that lie is someone taking you very seriously and listening to you very, very closely.

1:08:10 And someone who might be willing to take your lie as a marching order to reinforce or to support a resentment or an envy that they are nursing in their heart.

1:08:25 Totalitarian leaders, whether benevolent or tyrannical, rely on the power of your social proofing from your words. Leaders to reinforce totalizing control. They rely on it just like bread relies on. On butter, if you can get it.

1:09:06 Sam.

1:09:34 Back to one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich. No sense in getting your boots wet in the morning. Even if Shukov had dashed back to his barracks, he would have found another pair to change into. During eight years imprisonment, he had known various systems for allocating footwear. They'd been times when he'd gone through the winter without Valenki at all, or leather boots either, and had had to make shift with rope sandals or a sort of galoshes made of scraps of motor tires. Chetzeses they called them.

1:10:07 After the Chiabinsk tractor works, now the footwear situation seemed better. In October, Shukov had received, thanks to Pavlo, who he trailed to the warehouse, a pair of ordinary, hard, wearing leather boots big enough for a double thickness of rags inside. For a week he went about as though he'd been given a birthday present, kicking his new heels. Then, in December, the Valenki arrived and oh, wasn't life wonderful? But some devil in the bookkeeper's office had whispered in the commandant's ear that Valenki should be issued only to those who surrendered their boots.

1:10:42 It was against the rules for a prisoner to possess two pairs of footwear at the same time, so Shukov had to choose. Either he'd have to wear leather throughout the winter, or surrender the boots and wear Valenki even in the thaw. He'd taken such good care of his new boots, softening the leather with grease. Ah, nothing had been so hard to part with in all his eight years in camps as that pair of boots. They were tossed into a common heap. Not a hope of finding your own pair in the spring. Now Shukov knew what he had to do.

1:11:15 He dexterously pulled his feet out of the Valenki, put the Valenki in a corner, stuffed his foot rags into them. His spoon tinkled on the floor. Though he'd made himself ready for the guardhouse in a hurry, he hadn't forgotten his spoon and barefoot, sloshed the water right under the guards. Vilenky. Hey there, you slob. Take it easy. One of the guards shouted, putting his feet on a chair. Rice, another went on. Rice is a different category. You can't compare cereal with rice. How much water are you going to use?

1:11:46 Idiot? Who on earth washes like that? I'll never get a clean otherwise. Citizen Chief. It's thick with mud. Didn't you ever watch your wife scrub the floor? Pig. Shukov drew himself up, the rag dripping in his hand. He smiled ingenuously, revealing the gaps in his teeth, the result of a touch of scurvy at OOST Ishima in 1943. And what a touch it was. His exhausted stomach wouldn't hold any kind of food, and his bowels could move nothing but a bloody fluid. But now only a lisp remained from that old trouble.

1:12:26 I was taken away from my wife in 41, Citizen Chief. I've forgotten what she was like.

1:12:43 Citizen Pig. Idiot. I've forgotten what she was like.

1:12:56 The ties that bind society together are woven together for the gossamer of truth. No matter what you may think of that gossamer, it does bind society together. And when that truth is no longer protected or actively dismembered by those with the intent to build a quote unquote better world, it doesn't take long for man's inhumanity to man to appear in even the most inhumane situations. It also doesn't take long for those situations to morph into the actual hell verbalized in insults, degradations, and bureaucratic apathy that encourages leaders to stick with the totalizing lie rather than break it and destroy it in favor of the freeing absolute truth.

1:13:42 Leaders understand this, and leaders have the courage, and it is a courageous act to break and restrain the ties that bind with their language, their speech and their words. They raise the alarm, and they recognize when those ties are being cut, and they identify who's doing the cutting very clearly. And then they go about the process of reweaving back the fabric not only of the social contract, not only of the society, not only of individual entities, but they go back to reweaving the fabric of the social contract, the fabric of life together itself.

1:14:24 And they take this role very, very seriously, even, and especially now, innocuous leaders in innocuous places in the.

1:15:44 So why am I going on and on about this? Why am I lecturing into the void? Why is there no guest on the podcast? Why do I not have an Amen corner on this one?

1:15:57 Because quite frankly, I don't need it. And I want to be unambiguously clear. I am pro free speech, and I don't care if you're white or black. I don't care care who you sleep with or where you are at about your gender. I don't care what country you came from, and I don't care what ethnicity you have. I don't even care what God you serve or choose not to serve. I don't care. I am for untrammeled free speech. Now, with that being said, I'm also for untrammeled consequences for that speech. And by the way, those consequences, as I've already previously said, must be socially constructed.

1:16:35 And that's what we did in America. That was the American experience. Gosh, up until probably about six years ago, when everybody kind of just went crazy because a guy with a bad haircut came down an escalator and said he was running for president.

1:16:59 But we've been going crazy a little bit before that, and he was just a symptom of a much larger disease. And the disease is a loss of faith in the promise of America, a loss of a belief in the Republic, a decline of cultural confidence. And I've said this on other podcasts in other places, but I'll say it on this one. Our literature reflects our cultural confidence and our ability to read literature and understand hard literature as leaders reflects and shapes our ability to actually say 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 a heartbeat for any ideologue that comes along. And I firmly believe that. And by the way, the ideologue can be from the right politically, or the ideologue can be from the left politically, but you will abandon it, and you will abandon it in lies and betrayal. And the abandonment won't start in the voting booth. The abandonment will start in your home, in your school, in your neighborhood.

1:18:08 How can innocuous leaders this is the other thing I'm worried about. How can innocuous leaders in a modern Western culture, surrounded by the disturbingly unserious and influenced by the peculiarly lightweight, how can they avoid the path of least resistance and do the actual hard things, walk the hard path and do it in a way that will perhaps make them happy, but that for sure will create a better world. In essence, how can leaders tell the truth in a time of untruth and unseriousness? You want to know why some training programs in some sensitive areas like diversity and inclusion don't work?

1:18:47 They don't work because we're not telling the truth. We're merely passing along ideologies. You want to know why books and movies that have cultural tropes shoehorned into them about what you should believe or what you shouldn't believe? You want to know why those fail at the box office or fail to pull ratings or fail to pull subscription numbers? Well, they fail because they aren't telling the truth. The truth is complicated and messy, but it is the truth.

1:19:18 And the truth of situations, the truth of life, the truth of circumstances is multifaceted. It's not all one thing or another. Everyone is neither hero nor villain. As a matter of fact, Solzhenitsyn said, infamously enough, that the line of good and evil passes through each and every human heart. We are all sinful, and we have all fallen short of the glory of God. We are all our brother's keeper.

1:19:50 These are principles that I hold, and these principles undergird this podcast, and these principles undergird the books that we read on this podcast. I do not come to this work from an unprincipled, wavering Cultural position. I actually care very little about that. I care very much though, about rock ribbed principles and making sure that you all understand exactly where we stand and where I stand over here. And leaders, leaders have to be clear about where they stand and where they stand and stay on the path based on principles rather than on temporarily held positions.

1:20:36 You want to stay on the path as a leader? Start saying no. It's very simple. Just start saying no to a lie that you know is a lie. And it doesn't have to be a big lie, it doesn't have to be a medium sized lie. Usually the lies you have to start saying no to are lies in your own house, lies in your own business, lies in your own relationships, lies in your own communities. Say no to lies and say the truth. That is true liberty and that is true free speech. Sure, the humorists and the politicians may want to own that space, but it really begins the 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? Staying on the path requires rational engagement with the ever present now, as well as intentional preparation for the ever arriving future. The future is coming, no matter how you feel about, is agnostic to your emotions, but it is not agnostic to your preparing for it. And so staying on the path requires that rational engagement. And the only way you can rationally engage is if you have the freedom to speak the truth, if you have the freedom to not worry about being thrown into a gulag for pointing out that the emperor, whether the emperor is the emperor of Amazon or Walmart, or the emperor of the United States or China, or the emperor of the bank down the street and or the emperor of your family pointing out that the emperor, wherever he may show up or she may show up, pointing out that they are naked while everyone else claims that they are clothed.

1:22:37 Staying on the path requires leaders to engage with ideas, words, speech, and concepts that they might find to be personally objectionable, but that in principle must be aired to protect one of the two types of diversity that really actually do matter. And that's diversity of viewpoint. And the second is diversity of mindset. We all don't think alike, nor should we. We all don't have the same viewpoint and nor should we. And we need the freedom to air our viewpoints and air our mindsets without fear of a totalizing ideology clamping down on us.

1:23:25 Staying on the path means that leaders are emotionally and psychologically prepared for the consequences of speech against the potential 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 mob. Well, don't be.

1:23:49 The mob is fickle. 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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1:26:44 Alright, well that's it for me out.