Why you should read: Fyodor Dostoevsky [Recs]

Life Lessons from God’s Most Faithful Gambler

Nov 28, 2024

Hey, it’s Devansh 👋👋

Recs is a series where I will dive into the work of a particular creator to explore the major themes in their work. The goal is to provide a good overview of the compelling ideas, that might help you explore the creator in more-depth

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Beauty will save the World

-The Idiot

Based on personal observations- I’ve noticed a growing culture of rabid idol worship (both towards people and machines), sycophancy, and the devaluation of individuals (especially of those in outgroups) within the tech-finance-media landscape I’ve been hanging around in. This article is hopefully a reminder about the dangers of such a mentality taken too far.

Executive Highlights (TL;DR of the article)

Fyodor Dostoevsky is a legendary Russian novelist whose work heavily revolves around themes such as morality, love, an individual’s place in society, and much more. For this specific article, I wanted to focus on the following observations-

The Dangers of (Over) Rationalizing- Despite the often caricaturish depictions in media, Rationality and Logic can be an extremely comforting crutch- since they can bring order to a chaotic world and make things make sense. To live in a world that makes sense can be extremely empowering since a world that makes sense is a world that can be controlled- bent to our wishes to help us accomplish our goals. However, take this too far, and your world becomes a series of cogs and levers. You lose the ability to find meaning beyond that, which creates an easy path into nihilism. This is the point that Dostoevsky repeatedly warns us about since this mentality can be incredibly harmful- both to us and to the people around us.

The Devaluation of the Individual: The sacrifice of meaning and ideals at the altar of rationality can cause us to stop viewing other people as individual people with their own goals, agency, and desires. Instead, they become blips on our radar, worth attention only if they can serve our goals in some way. At this stage, we’re capable of justifying suffering, harm, and even the oppression of other people with powerful rationalizations and grand arguments. This is dangerous enough individually but creates a nightmare when it propagates throughout society.

How Utopias lead to Totalitarianism: Our society now has two prominent features-

People are starting to see other people (and the world itself) from the perspective of utility. This has a natural tendency towards individualism and fragmentation.
We no longer have any grounding toward higher powers or anything beyond us that compel us to value other people for their own sake, outside of what they can do for us.

This leads to a very special kind of arithmetic, one where we start to quantify the lives of people. We turn people's lives into units of measurement, condemning some less valuable groups for the creation of a better society, an ideal society free from suffering or inequality. And after all, why shouldn’t we? How small is the suffering of a few hundred people to ensure the prosperity of countless people in the upcoming generations (both on Earth and elsewhere)? A few thousand? Million? All rookie numbers when we compare to the infinite people of future generations who will be free from suffering.

This creates a breeding ground for tyranny and oppression, where we willingly give up our liberty and freedom to governments and oligarchies in the name of stability and prosperity. And why wouldn’t we? A bit of freedom is a small price to pay for the greater good. Why be scared “when you’ve done nothing wrong”?

And just like that, petite à petite, we lose autonomy over ourselves- instead becoming the numbers in society. Becoming statistics in a world where we must justify our existence.

So how do we get out? Dostoevsky’s solution is probably the most radical I’ve ever read.

Love your Captors: Dostoevsky’s idea of love is often overlooked when compared to his more overt critiques of atheism, nihilism, etc. Put simply, FD held unconditional love (the kind shown by Jesus when he asked God to forgive the ones crucifying him). FD’s love isn’t mere sentimentality or romantic infatuation. It’s a profound acceptance of human fallibility, a recognition of the inherent dignity and worth of every individual, regardless of their flaws, their mistakes, or their perceived “worthiness” to society. As stated by his characters, this is an incredibly difficult thing to do, one that will require extreme willpower and involve lots of setbacks. But it is absolutely necessary to prevent yourself from falling into the mentality discussed and will be the only way to truly connect with (and redeem) others falling down that slippery slope.

As with all other thinkers covered in this series, keep in mind that this is a fraction of what Doestevesky wrote about, and I’m by no means a final authority on FD or philosophy. Read his work for yourself, and share what you took away.

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How an Obsession with Rationality can Become Problematic

But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

To understand FD’s concerns, let’s understand some historical context. FD’s society saw the Church fall from social grace in many ways-

Figures like Martin Luther (not MLK) translated the Bible from Latin, making it more available to the masses- and challenging the church's authority as the sole interpreters of God.
Events like the Inquisition haven’t been great for the Church’s PR (in case you lack my highly evolved social IQ- torturing and killing people en-masse isn’t a great way to make friends. Shocking, yes).
The church also has a lot of fragmentation in beliefs.
The Enlightenment and increased Scientific Thought have answered a lot of questions that were so far shrugged off as “God Works in mysterious ways.” It also promised a better future, which is especially appealing when the alternative so far has been to pray that your family doesn’t significantly boost your local undertaker’s ARR (not very effective).
Napolean (not a high-ranking aristocrat or king) kinda turned the whole “divine right of kings” thing on its head when he tore through Europe.

All this (and more) weakened the authority of the Church, with/ more people more seriously entertaining nihilism and atheism, and many more under the belief that rational thought could go all the way in understanding the world (Kant, THE Enlightenment philosopher, was all about a rational God).

This context is important. FD wasn’t against reason and rationality by themselves but against the superimposition of reasoning as a replacement for faith, morality, and other values. To him, it could lead to a lot of problems, some of which we will discuss below-

Paralysis by Analysis

“I could not become anything; neither good nor bad; neither a scoundrel nor an honest man; neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything, that only a fool can become something.”
-Notes from the Underground

An over-reliance on rationality as a crutch for dealing with life’s suffering can lead to Paralysis by Analysis, as we struggle to account for all the variables before taking “the best” course of action. As struggle to model life with more dimensions/data, the paralysis becomes worse, until ruminating is all we can do. Suddenly taking action becomes a daunting task, and we find new coping mechanisms to keep delaying and staying cosy.

Not only is this terrible for our psyche, but such a state can cause us to lose touch with reality- trading in the messy complexities of real-world experiences for the neat mental models we create.

This tendency tends to worsen when we start to create a positive feedback loop-

We succeed in using rational thinking in certain technical work/problems.
This success makes us apply rational thinking to everything else
When it works (which it often does), we trust it more
When it fails, confirmation bias kicks in. We look for better logic, not a different approach. Failures also creates anger/resentment towards the world for not operating “in the way that it should”.

The problem with this approach is it reduces people to pieces in your mental model. Humans are no longer humans, but instead-

Gods to be emulated.
Tools to be used.
Trash to be ignored, “fixed,” or discarded.

In other words, you’re alone, the only human in a world w/ human-like entities. You’ve now robbed yourself of the ability to connect with other people, only plunging yourself deeper into your own abstractions of reality. (I won’t waste your time by talking about how internet echo chambers and social media algorithms that promote extreme views make this worse)

When we do this, we become a lot like Ivan Karamazov, only capable of loving people in the abstract (far away), while he’s unable to love a person (his neighbor)-

I could never understand how one can love one’s neighbours. It’s just one’s neighbours, to my mind, that one can’t love, though one might love those at a distance. I once read somewhere of John the Merciful, a saint, that when a hungry, frozen beggar came to him, he took him into his bed, held him in his arms, and began breathing into his mouth, which was putrid and loathsome from some awful disease. I am convinced that he did that from ‘self-laceration,’ from the self-laceration of falsity, for the sake of the charity imposed by duty, as a penance laid on him. For anyone to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.”
-The Brother’s Karamazov

Once we’ve succeeded in isolating ourselves from our fellow humans, there’s only way to go-

The Objectification of Life

“Crime? What crime?” he cried in sudden fury. “That I killed a vile noxious insect, an old pawnbroker woman, of use to no one! . . . Killing her was atonement for forty sins. She was sucking the life out of poor people. Was that a crime?”.
-Crime and Punishment

Once you get comfortable reducing people to Lego pieces in your mental models, turning them into statistics becomes very easy. This is where Dostoevsky’s warnings become particularly chilling — the leap from seeing people as abstractions to justifying their suffering is smaller than we’d like to admit.

FD shows this beautifully through Raskolnikov from “Crime and Punishment.” His initial rationalization was elegant in its simplicity: if one worthless person (the pawnbroker) dies, her money could help dozens of worthy people. His mathematical morality seemed flawless — sacrifice one “parasitic” life to benefit many (him, his family, the many people he would go on to help…). Yet this “rational” calculation led him to murder not just the pawnbroker but also her innocent sister, who happened to witness the crime. The more we justify other people’s suffering, the easier it becomes to turn the other way and engage with it even more.

We see this all the time. Despite all their grandstanding about wanting to connect people and make the world a better place, Tech Companies absolutely love funding extremely oppressive solutions like mass surveillance or automated weapons systems (how to break them)-

Big personalities love to act progressive until their real-estate valuations are threatened-

Or, look at the internal communications from oil companies that imply that these companies might be less excited about environmental sustainability than their public stance would imply.

With strong disparities b/w the intensity of the pledges of the Big 4 Oil Companies and the intensity of their actions- “We found a strong increase in discourse related to “climate”, “low-carbon” and “transition”, especially by BP and Shell. Similarly, we observed increasing tendencies toward strategies related to decarbonization and clean energy. But these are dominated by pledges rather than concrete actions. Moreover, the financial analysis reveals a continuing business model dependence on fossil fuels along with insignificant and opaque spending on clean energy. We thus conclude that the transition to clean energy business models is not occurring, since the magnitude of investments and actions does not match discourse. Until actions and investment behavior are brought into alignment with discourse, accusations of greenwashing appear well-founded”.

The clean energy claims of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell: A mismatch between discourse, actions and investments

These cases (and many others) all have the same basic cause- we boil down the suffering of strangers far away into the same spreadsheet that calculates the returns on our investments. The rest is simple arithmetic.

This sets the stage for our next discussion: how this individual devaluation, when adopted at scale, creates the perfect conditions for totalitarian systems. After all, if people are just numbers in a spreadsheet, why not optimize the spreadsheet? Why not reshape society itself to maximize the output? Once you accept that individuals can be sacrificed for the greater good, the only remaining question is: who decides what “greater good” means?

I simply hinted that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right… that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep… certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity). You say that my article isn’t definite; I am ready to make it as clear as I can. Perhaps I am right in thinking you want me to; very well. I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound… to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity.
- C&P

How We Give Away Our Freedom

I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born. .. In bread there was offered Thee an invincible banner; give bread, and man will worship thee, for nothing is more certain than bread. …Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?
-The Brother’s Karamazov

Once we have decided that the value of life can be quantified and some suffering justified for a “greater good,” we create the perfect breeding ground for tyranny — one that promises prosperity through the “scientific” management of human lives. We’re willing to do whatever it takes to attain the happiness of hypothetical future generations, even if it means crushing the freedom of people existing today.

The most dangerous aspect of this transformation isn’t its cruelty — it’s its rationality. Each step follows logically from the last:

We establish that some suffering is acceptable for greater benefits (Raskolnikov’s principle)
We develop systems to calculate and optimize these tradeoffs
We create institutions to implement these optimizations effectively
We remove “inefficient” human elements from decision-making
We accept increasing control in exchange for promised benefits

Dostoevsky saw this pattern emerging in his time through various utopian movements. These movements didn’t promise cruelty — they promised paradise. Just as Raskolnikov didn’t kill for the joy of murder but for a “greater purpose,” totalitarian systems don’t oppress for the sake of oppression. Totalitarian Systems convince you that to get to the utopia, you have to prioritize their stability over everything else. They also use both the carrot- promises of Utopias around the corner- and the Stick: the enemy looming at the gates, ready to infiltrate society and undo all the progress.

To a degree, we’re happy to surrender ourselves to the State since drinking the Kool-aid allows us to remove the burden of choice from our shoulders. There is a freedom in the bondage of becoming a tool for someone else’s will- especially when you do this for the future of humanity.

Fortunately, there is a way out. Let’s end with a discussion of how we can fight against the rise of tyranny. It’s a cruel path, which involves holding the other person supreme, even if it causes us to suffer (one of FD’s protags goes mad trying to help people)-

It is a joy, a bliss, and endless delight to me that ever I suffered my Passion for you; and if I could suffer more, I should suffer more.
-Not a FD quote, but I imagine he would agree with the sentiment.

Love will Redeem Us All

I am sorry I can say nothing more to console you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.

We fall prey to over-rationalization and the temptations of tyranny b/c we’re fallible humans. The false predictability of rationality is extremely attractive in a world where we are constantly reminded of how weak we are. No matter how much we try, trying to out-strategize these systems will not work, b/c they drag us into the same forces that caused the tyranny to begin with.

The only solution, then, is to embrace the divine within us. Just as Jesus (according to FD) commanded absolute love for everyone- Doestevesky insists that we must at all times love our fellow humans absolutely, flaws and all-

“Brothers, have no fear of men’s sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all of God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.”

In doing so, we prevent ourselves from falling into tyranny and create an environment where we can once again discover what the obsession takes away from us- the ability to appreciate another person’s intrinsic worth. We must love the person as the creation of a perfect God, regardless of how they behave. To condemn them is to condemn God, against whom we are always in the wrong.

I’ve always found this very interesting b/c 1) I’m an atheist and don’t share FD’s love for God, and 2) I don’t see how this can be squared with wanting to push for a better world (something FD was actively engaged with). The way I understand it, FD believes we split the action of a person from their worth. So we continue to love and honor the inherent value of the person (their soul??) even if we seek to change their actions. And that we must approach them with absolute humility, never putting ourselves above them. This is similar to how Sikhism preaches the divinity of service to another human being (“it is my honor to serve you b/c in serving you, I’m closer to God”).

I’m not a Sikh, Christian, or Doestevesky scholar, so I could be very very wrong about all of this. Lmk if that is the case. Nonetheless, I’ve found this to be a very inspiring state of being, and it would be very cool to have the absolute power to feel nothing but love for all people (#lifegoals). Maybe one day.

Until then, thank you for reading and have a wonderful day.

Dev <3

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