Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - The First 1984: We

Episode Date: May 4, 2023

It's a crossover spectacular! A little while back Asha and Ketho went on the Tsar Power Podcast to discuss the first dystopian novel about a totalitarian state: "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, published in 1924. Mass surveilance, depersonalization, and why Productionism is terrible. Check out Roberto and Brendan's podcast where they're ranking  every ruler of Russia @tsarpowerpodpatreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

I'm Roberto and I'm Brendan and together we're ranking the Russian rulers from Rurik to Putin this week is a book review we by Evgeny Zamyatin. Joining us today, we have Asha and Ketho from one of my favorite podcasts, Sword, Sorcery, and Socialism. If y'all can introduce yourselves, please. Oh, okay. I'll go first. I'm Ketho. I'm a co-host on Sword, Sorcery, and Socialism, which can be found anywhere you find podcasts It's a lit podcast, we talk about science fiction and fantasy

novels and the politics hidden inside them from a left-wing perspective So, yeah that's the deal Asha? Hi, I am Asha, I'm the other co-host of said podcast I'm the fascist host I'm kidding, I am Asha. I'm the other co-host of said podcast.

I'm the fascist host. I'm kidding. I'm joking. No, like Ketho said, we review mostly sci-fi and fantasy, looking at what authors do want you to take away from their books and what you can take away that the authors didn't intend for you to take away from their books. We recently finished, or just about to finish, a whole month on cyberpunk novels. So we like to do things in sort of thematic months. So if you want to hear about how cool and bad cyberpunk could be,

you can check us out our most recent episodes. Yeah, I highly recommend checking out that Ghost of the Shell episode because I'm really proud of it, honestly. I'm still so upset. I could not make it because I had other stuff to do. I was like, Oh, this is so good.

We had so many similar points. We'll bring it back on for something else. I promise. Okay. But this, I brought you guys on for this novel, which is called we, by Evgeny Zamyatin, or in Russian, Mui.

So the reason I wanted to bring you guys on is because this is one of the books that may have influenced Ursula Le Guin, and also because Adolf Huxley basically ripped it off. Not if he has anything to say about it. No, of course. But basically every other author agrees. No, of course. But basically every other author agrees. Yeah, because this came out about 10 years before Brave New World did.

My understanding is that it wasn't actually all that widespread because it was difficult to get a copy of it. I think the introduction said that. Well, it was difficult, but it was published in France and then spread out from there. But that's still almost like 1924 to 1931 should have had some spreading out. So there's a huge chance he may have read it by then. Well, if I'm correct, it also had a little bit of notoriety in that,

like it was a Russian novel that wasn't allowed to be published in Russia. And so I think among, or like it wasn't published in Russia. So I think from what I gathered, there was at least among authors anyway, there was some drive to read it just sort of because of the, the mystique of it, if that makes sense. Like, Oh, this is the one the communists won't let you read or whatever. One of the many. But this is the one they were like, no, you can't read this.

And this is around the time when like lenin was taking over so they they say um it it is certainly a satire of um certain aspects of the soviet union but it should be said that zimyatin has a pretty terrible habit of getting himself exiled for his writing because he can't help but satirize, if not the Tsar, then the Bolshevik government, which he in his Bolshevik activities helped usher in. And then he got himself exiled by them. Because this might come across to you initially as like a novel that comes out in the Soviet Union against the Soviet Union itself. But then you like look into him and you're like, wait a second. It's like you were also a Bolshevik. Well, I think technically he was out of the country for the first, what do I call it, first half of the revolution.

Like the actual revolutionary part, but like wasn't in the country when the Bolsheviks took over or something like that. It was one or the other. He missed one and was there for the other one. And then, yeah, immediately got exiled again. Which, look, I do kind of respect someone who manages to get themselves exiled

by multiple separate governments. I kind of got to hand it to him a little bit. Yeah, there's something to admire it to him a little bit. Yeah, there's something to admire about that in a weird way. Yeah, he wasn't there for the February one, but he was there for the October Revolution. And then he was like,

I wish I was here for the February one, because I could have done a lot more. I mean, he could have been there for the good one. Oh, sorry. Yep, basically. Sorry, I'm opening this podcast with the hot takes my apologies oh no go ahead this is patreon so yes feel free whatever you want but also i mean in all fairness regarding getting himself exiled it's not that hard to get yourself exiled from either czarist russia or soviet russia that the bolshevik party was a circular firing squad i'm honestly

more surprised the bolsheviks ex a circular firing squad i'm honestly more surprised the bolsheviks exiled them as opposed to like imprisoning him to be honest with you yeah that seemed to be more their style i was he exiled i think he was internally exiled by the czar in siberia so he had some street cred yeah yeah um but i think when did he get exiled where did he get exiled to to paris oh it's a paris oh right yeah yeah of course okay that that makes sense yeah yeah he lived the rest of his life in paris right and died there yes a time of great material hardship and loneliness oh no paris not in stalin's russia oh well i mean to be fair the i that's the second person i can think of from the ussr who ended who an exile went to paris and then sort of died sad and alone

because that's also what happened to mack no so yeah i was about to say uh i think like off the top of my head trotsky and mokno well trotsky died in mexico mokno died in paris and i don't know where emma goldman and alexander bergman berkman i don't know where they died but their whole thing of disillusionment and then probably dying very sad the theme carries over because again bolshevik russia was a circular fighting squad yes um i think she actually died um in toronto so she died in canada oh that's her heart yeah i didn't die in toronto yes wow uh says um for three months she improved slightly uh she suffered another stroke on may 8th and died six days later in toronto age 70 and then they allowed her body to be brought to the u.s for

burial which is buried in forest park illinois yeah it makes sense that she'd be buried near chicago yeah so let's just get sadder and sadder yeah this is russian history we're talking about yeah i was about to say this is this is probably the, this is probably one of the most, I don't know, if there was ever a time and a place that I would not want to have been, it's Russia during the Revolutionary Period. Oh, yeah. The Civil War, just some of the most depressing circumstances man has ever seen itself in. Any revolutionary period,

honestly. Like I, I enjoy, you know, um, history of the French revolution, but like, again,

circular firing squad, or in this case, a guillotine. Yeah. You know, you hit it with the, uh, for anyone that listens to the lions led by donkeys podcast,

hit it with their catchphrase, which is wait, it gets worse. Especially this podcast too yeah it's like russian history or no czar power take a drink every time something bad happens and now we're dead you'd be dead not if we have a say about it only handle that much liquor if you're if you're from the former soviet union um oh and this book real quick uh berkman last lived in nice france so another that's nice another one yeah and he met mr mokno in 1927 i did not know that i have no clue who these people are historical anarchists all of them russian except mokno he was ukrainian that's

right um actually no goldman was lithuanian yeah it's not it's not a race let's not erase our our baltic heroes now yeah oh man imagine how pissed the ukrainian nationalist would be if i said mokno was russian you know i'm you know i'm gonna i'm gonna slice that part and then just like just keep it as mackinac was russian and then just let it go look you'd anger like ukrainian leftists and also somehow ukrainian nazis would all be mad at you for like different reasons yeah and i also think uh shoot was gonna say this is the this is probably gonna be way worse than the time i said so and so uh figure from like norse legend history was danish i think i forget you said he was swedish or danish yeah no i definitely said i think he said he was danish i mean i remember learning it's like it may get confusing because if all you're familiar with is the basic stuff like beowulf i mean the king and beowulf is danish so

you know and it's an old english poem but beowulf himself is in english he's in an english he's swedish he's a geet yeah okay so let's get started yeah let's get started yeah let's talk about let's talk about let's talk about us we no talk about yeah the royal we yeah right right or wait the tailorized we there we go i find it interesting that there's there's like a through line in like dystopic novels in the early 1900s of this book is about depressing thing made undepressing for a fleeting moment with through the power of love. Um, and then depressing as hell ending. And he's like, woo. Well, the real question is, is that just the thing they all shared? Did a cultural zeitgeist or did, or did as some people would suggest a lot of them pick up on this book to start with.

I mean, I don't think you can say it was plagiarized because the power of love, like, well, yeah, you can't plagiarize that. It's like saying, Oh,

you can't, you can't adapt something in the public domain. Yes, you can. I mean, if, if Disney could copyright the power of love, I'm sure they would.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Like the corpus cup. they would. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Like the Corpus Cump they are. Yeah. Right, right. But no, like I immediately thought of 1984. Yeah, of course.

That same plot line. Oh, yeah. With Winston and Yulia. It's like. Yeah. Here's this big thing. And like 1984 did take thematics. It's like people, you know, not to start asha on a tangent

but it's like people you you take lord of the rings and people follow that you know the hero's journey forever like and you do that and even and even then like he was like directly taking the hero's journey from what we're talking about in the pre-show which is like old anglo-saxon and norse like eddas and stuff so but yeah it was popularized somewhere and you know was the dystopia briefly made better through love and then destroyed again was that sort of popularized or at least sort of spread by we it's possible i i would say that 1984 at least has a very hidden like moat of hope whereas this has less um so yeah yeah um because this they both end with a similar like like return to center where whether you're

talking 1984 is like i love big brother or this one where he's it's it's a very similar lobotomized yeah yeah but in 1984 there's like references and mentions of things in the story that make you understand that Oceania is not going to stand forever

yeah whereas this is like I've been lobotomized the machine is like, I've been lobotomized. The machine is now perfect. I mean, there is suggestion at the end that like outside the walls, things are still happening. Yeah. That is the one thing there is still an outside the walls,

which. And like, as I three 30 said, there is no final revolution. The goddamn. Yeah, exactly. There is no final revolution revolution and that's perfectly true

and i think like i kind of got the opposite um sense and this is kind of leads into my first thing i wanted to talk about which is that the at the end you say oh the machine is perfected well no not really because everything we learned before is that that entire notion is complete folly. There's a point where D-503 encounters a mathematician and he says something to the effect of, oh, I just discovered that, I just discovered the end of infinity. And D-503 is like, what?

Hold on, son, you're mistaken. There is no end of infinity and the simple fact is that you can build a wall around the city to keep nature out you can keep the hairy people out and what or what have you but yeah like uh i330 says there is no final revolution. One day, this society is going to collapse. It's a mathematical certainty. It doesn't have a choice. Yeah.

On some Ian Malcolm shit. I don't know who that is. It's the Jurassic Park chaos theory guy. The idea that like this society can't last because it mathematically impossible for it to last because something will go wrong right exactly and it's quite literally impossible to predict oh no absolutely um and like i something i did keep up from this is just like you also do see these references like throughout that

you know people aren't with the status quo at all times because you have characters such as r who's the poet r13 the poet and then oh uh oh 90 she's like yeah i don't want to be part of this system because they won't let me have the one thing i want the most, which is a kid. Right. Oh, for the listeners at home, people don't have names. They have a letter followed by three numbers. So our hero is D dash five Oh three. This and the seductress is I three 30. There's like a secretary named you. His normal partner is 090.

I think. The whole time I was I have to ask this question because I have to get it out of the way. Has anyone here seen the George Lucas film THX 1183? Yes. Yes.

I've seen parts of it. That's another thing. When I think i think about it really reminds me of this like really makes me because um i don't know it's just a george lucas thing to constantly use numbers um you know even in even in star wars he's like he's like oh you guys remember the the the t tjc 347 oh yeah it's like background dialogue, you guys remember the the the T. T.J.C. 347. Oh, yeah. It's like background dialogue is full of freaking numbers.

And, you know, that was another one where it's another sad dystopia where emotion is effectively purged. Then the main character gets a love interest and then escapes towards the end and there's a moat of hope in that you see a bird a single bird fly across the sun um in this main may also offer up the movie equilibrium which is another no that was the equalizer never mind i was thinking of denzel washington i was like no no no um equilibrium yes is the one which is a world where all emotion all emotion is illegal you have the enforcers who they whatever they call them the guardians or whatever that go around like stopping people from having emotions it's a totalitarian state where everyone reports on everyone for having emotion he starts to feel bad about things gets a love interest she gets killed he like tries to help the like the the rebels who like do art and have feelings it's another very very equivalent story story yeah also they do that in blade runner 20 47 i think 79 2049 oh yeah blade yeah blade runner 2049 because 2077 is cyberpunk yeah yeah yeah and blade runner 2049 um which also has numbers and letters to designate people instead

of names um k is constantly tested on having emotions. It's just Ryan Gosling making the same dumb face as he makes the whole time in Drive. I mean, I don't mind Ryan Gosling's face. Yeah, number one, fair. Number two, I don't care how silly it is, I like Drive, even though it's silly. I do like Drive too, yeah.

Drive's great. He does still just, you just, it's just perfect. Dead zone. Yep. It's just that like, you're like,

Oh, okay. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a pretty face to just stare at, I suppose. Well,

it doesn't emote at all. But one thing I can't unsee is what one of his eyes is significantly higher than the other and if you just look at him dead on you can't unsee it it's kind of like the feeling you get where you occasionally see like when you know when you see a cartoon that normally doesn't do front facing and you see it front facing for like a frame and you're like oh yeah like like painting it's like the simpsons or futurama where for like one frame and you're like, Oh yeah. Like, like in the Simpsons painting, it's like the Simpsons or Futurama where for like one frame, you see them like face. And you're like,

I don't, I don't want to see fry front facing. This sucks. Yeah. It's just weird. So get on this topic. It's fine. So we're,

we're, this is, this is date. This is the danger. So we were talking about the, the emotions being illegal and that everyone has a number. And I think that tangent was initially about like how many other works we could just come up with off the top of our head that have incredibly similar, like not only thematic elements, but like technical elements of everyone's numbered or you can't do your emotions or that the act of feeling things is often like the first step to rebelling that sort of i think at the very least this should tell everybody that we have as a species right now an incredible amount of anxiety

uh around that sort of thing like just emotions being purged or whatnot that does give me at least hope that these sorts of dystopias wouldn't sustain themselves for very long if they ever came into being because people would just be like what no and like throw bricks at things yeah i mean i think in the state of late capitalism that we are in this is actually best captured specifically by the apple tv show um severance because it's not a place where emotion is disallowed it's just one where if you have any kind of negative emotion you or you know some kind of negative outburst um somebody whose job it is to feign positivity is going to slowly try and convince you to be positive again double plus good it's it well no it's like it's like per for anyone that's worked in retail it's like essentially enforcing like the

front end retail positivity on everyone all the time. We're like, you're just like, oh, there's nothing to worry about. We're all great here. We're a family. Everything's great. We're going to be fine. Don't worry. Exactly.

They do the same bullshit in severance, which is why I loved it so much, because I genuinely feel it's one of the most like time specific satires. I mean, there are people who have issues with that being a present in like psychology to a degree um yeah it's obviously it's something that good good therapists try to ignore i like try to avoid but um this sort of like almost toxic positivity. Yeah. I was going to bring up toxic positivity. I think somebody wrote a book on that. I am. Yeah. Way too much of a,

of a, of a sad bitch to be, to deal with the constant positivity. Shout out to all the, all the people listening. I, I asked on this swords and sock pod Twitter, if anyone knows any good psychology books.

Go on over there. Drop me a rec if you got one. All nine people. I mean, this actually, this kind of gets to a critique that Mark Fisher had of psychology. I don't know if it was specifically specifically psychiatry but i think it ties into the like anti-psychiatry movement of the 60s which is that in a capitalist system he says this in capitalist realism if there are structural um issues that lead to somebody's depression you can't change that but you are being paid to make them feel better about it

um because that's simply that's the format of you know the talking cure it's you and another person in a room and they make you as an individual feel better but that doesn't change the structure it doesn't change the circumstances of your situation or the structural issues that might lead to your depression like for example how lonely we are these days uh because of i don't know why uh alienation yeah alienation um a loss of a sense of community um that's it it ultimately becomes a simply another means of making you a better worker because very depressed people have difficulty holding down jobs mentally ill people have difficulty holding down jobs and while the best thing for you to help them as an individual to do was to make them be less mentally or more

functionally mentally ill, you ultimately can't change the fact that they're just mentally ill people out there who are so far gone that they cannot hold down a job. And as a result, they become homeless because they're addicted to drugs or what have you. Yeah, there's a there's a reason that the rate of schizophrenia among the houseless population is so high. Exactly. It's just, and it's honestly hard to figure out whether, in which direction there is any potential causal link. It's like, did they become homeless because they were schizophrenic?

Or did they become more schizophrenic because they became homeless? It's like, it's very, it's a very, and, and, and it, people get very upset. When you start to point out that there are legitimate structural issues that are causing a lot of these problems that are not being addressed. Well, I mean, you can even, as this conversation, if I, if I may, we can really right back to the main themes of this book, which is the fact that like, this is the government in, we is essentially trying to like do both things.

It's trying to enforce this, this toxic public positivity, but it also attempts through this to like maintain the illusion of community community by making the entire populace of the place the community. You know what I mean? Everyone's community with the government. And so it's attempting to try and replicate that sense of community despite the fact that even in this totalitarian version, everyone's still incredibly atomized. in this totalitarian version, everyone's still incredibly atomized. The idea that you have to apply to have an unemotional sexual visit with somebody, that you can't do these sorts of things, they're still atomizing people to make them good, productive workers. That's still what's happening, be it capitalist or not. And there's still and it fails for the same reasons.

It's also like this whole community is also hyper-tailorized. So like they took like the science of scheduling and took it to the max. And like you also see this, you also see that they even say, yes, our Bible is this book of scheduling from an old train station where everything's just in perfect order and you know the trains are always running on time and i'm like okay have you been on a train before because this would never happen this is this is what the times they say but here's what's going to actually happen this that trade if it's amtrak's going to be 20 minutes late well that also could just be an american rail problem yeah in russia too okay yeah yeah so for again for the listeners at ho when we use the term taylorism um that refers to frederick winslow taylor who was i'm not sure who he was but the point is he came up with a sort of system of, I believe,

I'm not sure if this was Gustave or Taylor himself, but he was the originator of certain ideas surrounding factory production that would more or less get workers to behave more like machines so they could do their job better oh yeah he was he was an engineer an american engineer so yeah i'll say it's always engineers yeah the somewhat ironic thing although in my opinion it's not all ironic if you like go back to the origins of uh the ideas that to both capitalism, as we know today, and the particular kind of Bolshevik strain of Bolshevik communism that was being practiced here. Both Henry Ford and Lenin used Taylor's ideas in an attempt to boost production more or less i just smacked my mic whoops to try to boost production um so it says in the introduction proletarian poet alexei gastev was also the head of the central institute of labor founded in 1920 in the soviet union and in some of his research this is what he did um hundreds of identically

dressed trainees would be marched in columns to their benches and orders would be given out by buzzes from machines the workers were trained to hammer correctly for instance by holding a hammer attached to and moved by a special machine so that they internalized its mechanical rhythm. The same process was repeated for chiseling, filing, and other basic skills. Gostev's aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of, quote, human robot. He envisaged a utopia where, quote, people would be replaced by, quote, proletarian units identified by ciphers such as A, B, C, or 325, 075, O, and so on. These automatons would be like machines, incapable of individual thought, and they would simply obey their controller.

A mechanized collectivism would take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat. There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul would no longer be measured by a shout or smile, but by a pressure gauge or a speedometer. So that's the worst shit I've ever heard. Yeah, it is. And this was the actual labor guy. This was the head of the Central Institute of Labor and proletarian poet Alexei Gostev.

So effectively, this book is literally just using that. Yeah, which is part of probably why he got exiled from the Soviet Union, because he was directly satirizing these policies. Well, that is the ultimate nail in the coffin, in my mind. that's that's beyond like horrible yeah that is that is um irredeemable honestly well don't you know uh human emotion is bourgeois actually yeah i know you're sad but that's too bougie feeling happy and sad are all um are bourgeois affectations yeah and this ties into an idea that was floating around the side of the soviet union at the time which was the new soviet man it was the perfect worker this the uber mensch of workers who was just so good at farming and factory labor

that the soviet union would soon surpass all other nations in terms of product productivity hold the more yeah it was that big strong guy with a hammer that they put on all that like early propaganda which i mean granted it goes hard as fuck i have to say but it's still dystopian as hell my favorite propaganda piece is the one where they're like, trying to still trying to be friends of China. And you get the one that it looks like it's a cute, like Russian. It's like a Russian and a Chinese.

Oh yeah. With their adopted kids. Cause they're gay and in love. I might be the only one. I might be the only, only one who is relatively unaffected by that style of Soviet propaganda. And I think it's because i've always held the more let's say intensely anti-work position generally so all of their

propaganda which is like be productive never really never really got me i think yeah i mean in terms of like propaganda like uh there's a lot of soviet realism i find beautiful but realism is boring so i don't like it speaking of like even you know going on the soviet state theme what else would would you not have like in a soviet union other than the secret police what do you mean look the world guardians aboutough of Guardians and the League. Oh, we're talking about the secret police. Okay, okay. Yeah. I just want to point out that they also call them guardians of the Handmaid's Tale. Yes, they do. Never read it.

Yeah, but they do. They call them the same thing. It's a common term. But I mean, all good totalitarian states have secret police. I mean, please. It's essentially a foundational necessity if you need that sort of population control. Especially in this case where the population control

goes very, very deep. Like, deeper than any real existing location has ever managed to go. Glass buildings. You can literally see into people's rooms.

And they only bring the shades down for sex which yeah you know imagine like being in that world and then everyone sees that your shade is down and they're just like winking and nudging at each other like you literally every single person sex would be a passionless experience and they'd be like oh business as usual well i mean i think that's the point it's supposed to be a passionless experience that's like yeah that is that's the goal i mean they even did a test like they do biological tests when she like hit puberty in the book but yes they figure out how many times a week you need to get a pink slip to go and have sex. You know,

some people have, you know, need, you know, have a Uber drive. They need to have it three to four times a week. Me, I just need,

you know, once or twice for me is fine. And that's literally like what he goes. And then he gets the one from I, and then the base of it, which he barely gets ever gets to use yeah getting your getting your sex yeah to get your pink sleep from the department of preventing inceldom look this is literally not that different from the incels to think that there's like government

mandated yeah yes like state mandated girlfriends like it's really not that different from the incels to think that there's like government mandated yeah yes like state mandated girlfriends like it's really not that different yeah except it's in some ways it's a little bit more depressing because instead of having long-term partners it's just somebody that you like meet up with once in a while you have you know a passionless sex and then you leave and like your eyes roll in the back of your head like you're one of the human computers from dune and you're just like emotion purged at least i guess i guess at least um in a way there's no uh caked in misogyny with I mean but there was there there is but not in the same way that like the incel them that's that's what I'm getting at I'm getting at that that that you

know the incel thing is more a possession domination mindset this is more like yeah and sort of like something and even like to compare it to incels both the one state and incels are guilty of some sort of um objectification that purges uh i don't know purges the other of all value i guess you could say all emotional attachment it's like i'm not sure how to describe it with the one state everything is so regulated so captured in these little schedules so scientifically and precisely matched when to sex in it's not really all that different from how sexual behavior is regulated and oppressed within the family system. Speaking of families. I was going to say, maybe I'm not remembering correctly, within we, is it just the dudes who get the pig slips for deciding how often they need to have sex? No, women do too.

Women do get their own. Yeah. Cause that's why O has two partners. No, that's right. Him and his best friend. I forgot. Yeah.

Yeah. They're Eskimo bros. They're Eskimo. It's, I suppose it's an insensitive way to refer to Inuits, but you get the idea. Yeah. Yeah.

To use an early two thousands term. Yeah. You know what? Nevermind. That's just too much work for patreon yeah it's like you won't pay us for this they pay to hear the real stuff but we're men subject to the same like standards for being allowed to procreate like the women are like oh oh nine zero was like too too short to have babies or something like barely she's barely too short to have a kid yeah but like do men have the same in in we i don't remember do men have requirements they they say they never mentioned 503 says oh in a few years we'll be able to understand genetics so precisely that we can make superman something to that effect um and this is sort of like one thing i want to get into which is i guess what i will call like bad science eugenics is a pseudoscience for a reason and one of the major

reasons is although the one state may want to capture and precisely scientifically understand genetics, genetics only does its job if there's one, mutations, and two, which is why eugenics for, for many other reasons is not only ethically unsound, but scientifically very unsound goes against everything. We actually do understand about the real science of genetics. I mean, that's why, what's his name said? You need to nuke the atmosphere occasionally to keep mutations high. Was that the Starship troopers guy yes it was heinlein there's heinlein in stars when he talks about one of the non-earth planets he's like there's not enough radiation here so they have to nuke the atmosphere occasionally so human genetics still have variations without radiation evolution doesn't happen more wow so true that's why the ecosystem in chernobyl is thriving thrive absolutely sparkling it was because of the radiation not because people there

there aren't people well i also do want to add that even though the one state is trying to get this like pristine gene pool you still have those variations because like there's a reason um zamyadin has brought out like features like oh r505 no d503 has like hairy arms and hairy hands yeah like because and then like you know r13 has negro's lips but that's more of a reference to a to the father of russian literature pushkin who's also a poet because he was oh yeah pushkin was biracial yeah he was quarter black so like he had like a quarter black right yeah he had you know he had as zamjatin said negro lips they translated his african lips in mine um it was negro in mine so i was i probably have the 1924 version so probably yep uh yeah another uh not so nice word

we might have to leave out but whatever uh he had yeah so so r13 has african lips so i can slice that in so the point is you can't stop people from fucking you just can't absolutely not if there's one thing you should learn from actual human history and then the way humans construct any fantasy story they create they will be fucking i mean you see o90 still has still finally gets pregnant from that one miracle night with d503 and then can you see how hard d503 was simping for i330 yeah i mean we all we all simp for a matic pixie dream girl so oh yeah she gave more like domi mommy vibes for me although she did represent like that seductress like forbidden fruit sort of thing she reminded me of dominique oh you're

so dangerous but i can't stop myself no well i mean yeah yeah uh i330 actually reminded me of dominique from the fountainheadhead by Ayn Rand. Well, I mean... I haven't read it. But Ayn Rand did get things from... Ayn Rand has read We, that is for sure a thing that happened. Yes, she has. Is that why she had that harem of men?

Probably, yeah. God. She read We and then was like i don't get it i mean she she used she actually a part of an inspiration for um anthem yeah which uh which uh you know i don't want to just and also going back i don't want to disparage anyone's uh you know preferences but if your preference is uh having sex with Ayn Rand, I do question you generally. But I think the one thing that unites this is that factories were present in both capitalist and communist countries. And they both use the same methods. And the one state, this dystopia we're describing, is simply an extension of those methods to all of society.

Yeah, this is something that when I was reading it, I was like, it did feel like something that uniquely came from someone who had real critiques of the Soviet Union, but also was not a big fan of capitalism either. It's like you could you could tell there was like this deep seated, like dislike of workplace stuff, more so of just of just the labor itself and like the processes that went into it i think it it it i don't know if suffers the right word but it suffers from what i like to call uh 1984ism which is that like you'll have you know stalinists saying that 1984 was critiquing capitalism and you'll have capitalists saying that 1984 is critiquing Stalinism. No, it was both. Exactly. But because it does, because it is doing both, you eat each, either side can like take it as like, try to claim it as their own for the other way. So when you said, you know, like Anne Rand could read, we would be this unfettered capitalist. Well, it's because she just looks at it and goes that's the soviets not you know my my

free men of free markets or whatever it has that that thing because people in either system tend to be blind to the fact that it's critiquing both of them yeah uh related aside about 1984 um there's a statue of orwell outside the bbc but part of orwell's um thing in 1984 regarding propaganda um winston's job of changing history he partly drew that from his own experiences of broadcasting propaganda while he was working for the bbc yes that is correct ironic isn't that ironic i mean yeah orwell is another just another good example of someone who's very bluntly and blatantly critiquing both systems but gets claimed by both um yeah and then especially in american schools gets twisted into being a critique of one of these two things and not the

other yeah i think i don't think we discussed soviet history much when we read 1984 in high school that brief aside i hate 1984 i like the ideas the ideas are cool are cool i hate how it's written uh i mean it's definitely not my favorite orwell i if I have to read Orwell I'd rather read Amage to Catalonia or Down and Out in Paris he's a better essay writer than a novel writer I love Killing an Elephant I think it's amazing

even though it's like you know it puts itself as a critique of imperialism which it is but it also has a lot of imperialism, which it is. But it also has a lot of imperialism still in it. But anyway. That's just being British.

Yeah, true. Yeah, I mean, he was a very flawed human. I mean, like all of us. Yeah, he's a flawed human being. Flawed? But his biggest flaw was being British. Yeah, his biggest flaw was being british so oh the poor lad yeah the one unforgivable predisposition for saying horrible things about indians it's the one unforgivable being born english yeah

ah i guess hey that's why he needed his that's why he needed his catholic forgiveness anyway exactly so to take this back with like what's wrong with both capitalism and uh soviet communism i'm not going to get into the argument of whether or not it was real communism i don't care uh it reminds me of something i was saying i was trying to read the wealth of nations um i got through book one and the number one impression i got was oh both smith and marx think that one of the one of the measures of a successful society is productivity as long as your factory numbers are going up society is doing a-okay and that is exactly the problem uh yeah the my running gag is if you pulled if you pulled wealth and nations and had

like a modern like capitalist read it they would be like this is socialism there's a lot of overlap between between the two in in terms because i mean that was that was one of marx's biggest influences yeah that's where i got the labor theory of value from yes and at and adam smith also does really hate landlords. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, he despises them. I think he said at some point, societies are most going to ruin. No, sorry. He says, if you're going to make legislation or policy, if the owning class,

which is saying landlords or factory owners, tell you to do something, do the opposite of that. Which is, again, ironic ironic the fact that he was British and literally the most powerful voting lobby in the entire UK are landlords. Yeah. Like currently.

It was even worse back then when he was writing in 1770. Well, I think it took 10 years to write so he started in 1766 yeah but it like as you're pointing out it is this sort of great irony that like sort of the what we're called the founder of capitalism and one of the sort of nominal founders of communism both have this concept that the more you're, if the line goes up, your society is doing good. Yeah.

And so that both of their respective, which is one of his many mistakes. Yeah. And so the idea that like both of the sort of hegemonic powers that grew out of, after the, of the post-war period, they each had their guy,

but the foundational principle was the same. Make more, more better, win. Yeah. And to defend Marx a bit, it's kind of a straw man because that was not the only thing. Of course. But he did believe at some point,

like, okay, if we just, if we're just productive enough, things will be all good. At some point, robots if we just if we're just productive enough things will be all good um robots are meant to take over that didn't happen it's also more that's what people took from him is sort of what what's the important key here is that's what like the early soviet union took from marx was the distressing number of people still take from him um yeah just like okay especially because i think nowadays that veneer is starting to wear away more than it used to um with the more open understanding that people well not even understanding but just transparency that

people can actually see the stock market more often than not. Like, so people look at the line, go up and realize their life ain't getting better. You know, unless you use today's sponsor, Robin hood. All right. Democratizing finance, whatever the fuck it's called.

Acorn, something like that. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, acorns is the little one where you like round your money. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And put it in. And then Robinhood is the one where you manually select.

Like you just are day trading. Today's sponsor, Coinbase. Oh, Jesus Christ. I saw another one on like some YouTube. It was like you invest – you partly invest in works of art, works of art. And it's like, you know,

this is kind of like, like just old school NFTs. You're just hoping that it goes up in value and that's it. Yeah. I, there's people, I mean, people are constantly wanting more money.

I mean, it's a part of the system. So it's just the... I mean... They're going to find the stupidest ways to do it. That's kind of how it works. They're going to find the dumbest ways to do it. And the one cool thing about the one-state is that there's no need for money. Yeah, that is the thing, is it it does at least coming from, you know,

someone living under the Soviet system, it does definitely lean towards the like totalitarian productive state that is cashless, that is moneyless. That you just sort of like are given what you're given, you know? Wow. Like you get your government mandated food, your government mandated waifu, like your government mandated like walks in the park or whatever.

Yeah. You don't have to pay for any of that. Rare United State, rare one state W getting rid of cash. I know, right? Get rid of cash. And I guess, you know, they still do have a culture. You get to take a walk every day? Yeah. They force you to go out and get

exercise. The one thing is they still have culture and everything because you do have the poet who's in the book. It's one state poetry. They still have religion. A schedule.

Yeah. You can still have faith. You just have faith in the schedule but that to be fair is pretty close to that sort of like the sort of soviet atheism which was supposed to be replaced by like a faith in this in the party in the state as opposed to a faith in God or whatever. Or history, if you follow Zizek's analysis. Who? Zizek. Oh, my God. Our boy Slavoj, the glizzy gulper. Yeah.

Oh, there we go. Okay. And he does it through a Lacanian lens. Oh, yeah, he does. Everything's through Lacanians. I don't agree with Zizek all the time, but I will say the shirt that says i prefer not to goes really hard he's he's a he is a raccoon man who somehow became well known for philosophy this kind of self-aggrandizing even his event

even his admirers will admit this the honest ones anyway yeah yeah sure um well on the subject of being cashless it does say in the introduction that when um in the early days of the soviet union people stopped bartering in rubles and they started bartering in i think uh ration cards and all of the writers and cultural like intellectuals they got their ration cards through doing lectures that the state uh paid them to do and that's how they got by so you know not much changes it's still every time if you can't make money off writing, you go lecture at your community college. Look, if you can't make money off your writing, you know, you pick up a side gig. You know, it used to be lecturing your community college. If you're an author these days that can't get a side gig, you start a podcast. or you do what Stirner did which is that you start out as a teacher and then quit your job because you're under the false impression that your book will set you up

for life when that didn't happen many such cases I have a question for you guys have you guys read Faust I haven't no I know the story yeah I was about to say it's pretty I've seen Ghost Rider I know the story. Yeah, I was about to say it's pretty... I've seen Ghost Rider. That's close enough. Well, you do have the revolutionary group called the Mephi.

Oh, yes. I didn't notice that. Wow. Yeah, so they take, you know, taking the name from Mephistopheles. The demon in Faust. Oh, yeah, that is... I did know it was taken from Mephistopheles, the demon in Faust. Oh, yeah. I did know it was taken from Mephistopheles. I did figure that out, but not from the Faustian angle.

Because as a huge D&D nerd, I'm like, I know who Mephistopheles is. I was about to say, I know where you figured that one out. He's trapped in a – I'm pretty sure he's the one that's trapped in an iceberg in one of the layers of hell. Yeah. Yeah. He's the, he's the frozen brick.

That's what happens when you try to overthrow Asmodeus. Is that like directly taken from, uh, I mean, I know it's taken from Dante's Inferno, but is he like fully frozen or just up to his waist? Like he is in the original. He's fully frozen.

Fully frozen. He's like, he's like, he's like he's like he's like uh he's like lich king at at like the beginning of warcraft 3 yeah he's completely sealed in a solid cut like han solo and carbonite block of ice but he's but but he's telepathic so he can still command his minions and he still rules that layers of hell so again it's ice again forever literally more like the lich king at the beginning of warcraft 3 right um but that's where i remembered mephistopheles from but i figured that was a there was an interesting angle to have taken to name the rebel group after

like a famous devil but that sort of presupposes this sort of religious under or reading of this entire story, which sort of, as we talked about earlier with the idea of them still having religion, it's supporting like the one state as, as God. And then, you know,

you've got the, the rebels as devils attempting to overthrow, you know, the perfection of, of, of God, which is a slightly more esoteric reading of this of we oh i was gonna say that he just took it from paradise lost oh that too it's also a cool word yeah and i find it like really interesting because d503 is

constantly commenting and how oh the ancients were such savages they did it this way now we're so much better we do it this way and it's really i mean to take it again back to the supposed death of god in the soviet union you can claim all you like and again i'm just gonna quote i'm just gonna rip off zizek here you can say all you like that this state is officially atheistic but zizek in either the pervert's guide to ideology or the pervert's guide to cinema when he's reviewing this uh soviet propaganda film he points out that god has simply been supplanted by history and yeah history is god now and history will guarantee our success in the future. Um, which also has the effect of anything, quite literally anything done in the name of history is justifiable.

Yeah. Um, well, I think what I was trying to think of the more, to be more eloquent with what I was saying before, when you're talking about this, like the history and the state itself is what's become this religion, is that Zamyatin was also strongly influenced by Dostoevsky, of course, notes from the Underground and the Brothers Karamazov. And from that lens, you can see this as a critique

of this militantly atheist society. But there are, what I was referencing is there are readings of this, which actually references that we is sort of paralleling the beginning of Genesis where the one states paradise, Adam and Eve, of course, or D five Oh three and I three, three, zero S 47, 11 is, and I-330. S-4711 is the snake because he's having a double curved body is the way he's

being described. He's also like the betrayer of course. And so and the Mephi are of course are allusion to Satan. So you have this it's like a religious overlay but in a way as to critique a society that as you were pointing out is sort of militantly

atheist, where there isn't a God anymore, but it still uses the trappings of religion to make this critique of the non-religion of the state. Right. And I think that's one thing I did enjoy about it. I don't know if I'm reading this into it or if this was a mutant's intention i'm pretty sure it was um it's the idea that in the one state um i think he actually says in the introduction um it's heretics and madmen that create revolutions and he points to what would classically be defined as temptation or sin as being something that helps people realize freedom um it's more of a promethean line than it is um one that you'd get from genesis because in genesis it's temptation itself that causes all the suffering in the world and that's also true in the myth of prometheus but prometheus is still

regarded positively by people because he is the creator of humanity and there's also the fact that heracles eventually frees him with zeus's permission so i think he's saying um no actually the fact that the cracks in the system appear when people are tempted when people are tempted by sexuality like um d503 is with i-330 that's a good thing that's how revolutions happen. And that's how you break out of this society. We live in a society. This government that tries to conceive of an inherently ungraspable, chaotic, wild world and put it into little neat grits. It exposes the folly. Yeah, I think that kind of loops back to where we started at the beginning of the conversation is that the idea that all these emotions can be regulated and controlled. A lot of times in I would argue, I think you're right that like in every society, the things that shake up the system are what we would call like temptations or, you know, urges, you know what I mean? Things that like are outside of the standard or whatever's socially acceptable to whatever your society is. It's that urge to be trans, either to be transgressive or to be self-gratifying in some way, or to taste the unknown is going is the same urge or the same route where you get people who think, oh, there

it doesn't have to be this way. There can be something else because my my emotions or whatever are telling me that I want something else. And it's the the idea of acting on those things is what leads you to revolutionaries, because if you always stay within the box of what you're allowed and only satisfy urges those way, then you're obviously never going to change anything. And I think you can extrapolate that to something, you know, like the history of, of, you know, like queer history for rights for like LGBTQ people, right? The idea that you're being transgressive in a way to society's standards,

because you have urges that are not satisfied by what is societally acceptable, leads to revolutionary activity. Which is why capitalism will always, late capitalism will always be more dystopian than Zamyatin could ever dream of. Because the point of capitalism is capturing people's desires. Yeah, it subsumes all critiques, etc. Whatever your revolutionary idea is, capitalism can take it, subsume it, and profit off of it. Don't you worry. And if something ails you from late-term capitalism, we can sell it. We can sell you the solution. We can sell you a pill to help you take care of it. Yep, Simon pill, but anyways.

Czar Power endorses you taking your pills. Please do not stop taking your pills. Yeah, please do. If you need the pills to make you feel good, you taking your pills. Please do not stop taking your pills. Yeah, please do. If you need the pills to make you feel good, you should do that. I have pills on my desk in front of me. You should take them if necessary. Please do. Anyway. I was going to say, this is not, what was it, 500 days of summer or whatever,

where he throws his medicine away and is suddenly just better through the power of Pixic Pixie Dreamgirls. It doesn't work that way. That made me feel better at all times. If he was throwing away his antipsychotics, then he could have been manic at that time. You don't know. True. I've been dying to say this

the whole time, and I've sort of talked about it, but this is kind of an awkward segue the whole concept of the one state wanting to just capture everything that's an inherently uncapturable because it's a infinite and be chaotic it's reflected in a lot of the what i would call bad mathematics that d503 engages in bad math, bad math. I don't know.

I just suck at math. So like, I've got a broad strokes, but ask any statistics teacher I ever had. And you know how, how that went. I was going to say that you're never took anything about. I got a,

I got a, a two D's in a row on my honors calc test, dropped into a regular calc class, got a B, and then never took another math class again. Am I the one on this podcast that's taken the highest level of mathematics? What's your highest level? Well, I mean, it was college calculus. I took college calc. What's your highest level? Well, I mean, I had, it was college calculus. I took college calc. I was going to say, then I had to do it,

but I had to do it so I could do other stuff for my economics minor. I had economic stuff. So like I actually had to do the regressions and do all that other nonsense to figure out when you're going to substitute mustard for ketchup at your stupid fucking hot dog stand or whatever. Yep. I did accounting business statistics and calculus. Yeah. Okay. What a fake use of math.

Yeah. I know. Right. I got a D and AP stat in high school, a D in college level stat. And I got a D in symbolic symbolic logic which was a philosophy course philosophy course which even my philosophy professor was like you're terrible at this just try to pass the class and do something else but i'm good at broad strokes and conceptual mathematics i guess you could say unless conceptual

mathematics is an actual field never taken any such class or studied it sue me well um say i think it might be yeah brandon if it makes you feel better i have a theoretical i have a theoretical degree in physics so um so throughout the novel d503 mentions that he is terrified of the square root of run square square root of negative one i am also terrified of the square square root of rum so yeah square root of negative one so the reason he's terrified of it is because you can't directly represent the square root of negative one you could only write it as that or you can only write it as I, or I squared, I cubed, what have you, I squared being the same as one. And in the concept of mathematics, there are, not concept of mathematics, in mathematics, there are irrational numbers.

There's pi, there's a square root of two, there's phi, the the golden ratio they're called irrational numbers because they go on to infinity three point one four one five ninths where does pi end it doesn't end anywhere but despite the fact that it's quite literally impossible to represent it entirely we still apply irrational numbers every day you need pi to find the circumference in the area of a circle um phi the golden ratio shows up everywhere in art in architecture i forget what the square root of two is used for but there's a lot of other irrational numbers that we need and for that matter there are applications for irrational numbers such as i aka the square root of one which is impossible but you still if you have a phone the square root the square root of negative

one the mathematics of that was applied in making your phone so d503 engages in a sort of bad mathematics because despite the fact that we have all of these you know impossible or rational numbers there are still applications for them in technology and engineering but the one state can't abide something that is impossible to grasp because of its infinite nature or its unknowable nature. And so the doctrine of the one state suppresses these. Yeah, it tries to, it can't handle anything that isn't neatly placeable into a box. Exactly. It can't be hyper simplified and and made perfect um even though pie is just kind of

inherently imperfect and and what's really like yeah funny about it is it with agorist was terrified base like of what base you're counting in it doesn't it doesn't matter it's like it's like so much it's just an ungraspable ungraspable concept that is just found in nature and geometry as it stands. And you can't represent it on a piece of paper. That's it. Is that just kind of mean that effectively the project to send people to space is doomed to failure? the project to send people to space is doomed to failure. If they don't allow people to use those sorts of numbers, then yeah, you would never have a space program.

If you're, if you can't like do advanced mathematics, this is by the ways, very early for someone to be like, yes, space program. Um, yeah.

1920s. It's not going to work because Elon Musk is going to set up his glass domes and then somebody somewhere is going to try to drift on a forklift and just crash directly through the glass dome and all the air is going to get sucked out. We've talked about

him and Zuckerberg's weird interpretations of what the future are. We haven't released the episode yet but snow crash is just excited where they like like we've just come to the conclusion they're they're they're pure ascetists like like they just they see the aesthetic of science fiction do not understand the messaging or point and then go for the aesthetic because they think it's cool even though the aesthetic is directly tied to things like the actual ineptitude

of the society being critiqued um you know glass domes being a great example it's like if it's not being used aesthetically i'm sure that the first person who was like glass domes in space was probably like not engaging with it in a purely aesthetic way. And yet they're using it in a purely aesthetic way when they try and apply it. It's like, yeah, it's like Peter Thiel naming his company Palantir because it engages in surveillance. It's extremely funny that you say that, because, again, that's another thing that comes up in Snow Crash is Peter Thiel. Well, so not in Snow Crash, but in our episode about it. One of the many people directly inspired by the book Snow Crash was Peter Thiel. Oh, my God. Of course he was.

You can make the argument that Snow Crash is a book that takes away almost all the critiques of cyberpunk and turns it into purely aesthetic cyberpunk. Yeah. If you listen to the episode, you can listen to us across the court. The episode realized that the book actually isn't cyberpunk because it doesn't have any of the critiques the genre is supposed to have. And instead it's just a,

it's just a fanboying of how cool cyber, how cool it would be to have a, have like a katana. And it's where metaaverse comes from. And literally where the Metaverse was born. Literally. It's where Zuckerberg is just like, oh, it's so cool.

And it's like... So check out their episode. The Palantir is evil. It's a product of Sauron. Why would you name your company that? If you didn't want to come off ason. Why would you name your company that? If you didn't want people to give, if you didn't want to come off as evil,

why did you name your company Palantir? Because it goes like this. Whoosh. Well, actually, the Palantiri were created by the Numenoreans, and it's just that the master one fell into the hands of Sauron. Actually. Oh, okay. Sorry.

Whatever. I'm sorry. Ergo, it's evil listen yeah listen but like the but that but that like you're saying that idea that like how many times we've referenced the tweet over our past few episodes that's like sci-fi author i've written a book called don't build the death machine 3000 venture capitalist i've built the Death Machine 3000 from the book. Don't build the Death Machine. Like that is so commonly like the outcome. But like something that like I even noticed to kind of bring it back to we is you do see like a lot of these people like, oh, yeah.

Like with the integral integral like even the integral fails to like because they take it up into the into the air and then it crashes down i mean it doesn't help them because the mefi wanted to take it away but then it just didn't work i found it hard to follow i think the mefi wanted to like point it at the wall or something the green wall that makes sense oh yeah they wanted to break the wall they wanted to blow a hole in the wall yeah yeah yeah well they did yeah so i just forget it was really hard to follow through their own incompetence instead c503 is not a the most reliable narrator no i mean not at all not at all i couldn't follow him half the time i was like

what are you talking about he's just going on his rants i actually did my normal thing where i started listening to it like while i was at work like doing the audiobook like while i'm at work and i realized that like i couldn't work and listen well enough to like follow it so i actually had to like you know do it like separately normally i can listen to a book while i'm working but this like like you were saying like just the way it's written in the in the way that uh way that, uh, D 503 narrates, I was like, Oh, I actually have to pay attention to this.

I had the lit, I had the lit charts summary pages open as I was reading. So I could like, this is my third time reading this book and I still don't understand it. Yeah. I just, I just, I read it for college twice.

Yeah. That's yeah. I just sort of went with the the method i picked up reading antietapus it was like i don't understand this i'm just gonna skip this part damn that that's a real well that'll be fun when i get to it what can i do honestly that's a real chat move right there i don't know what this is i don't know i saw some some meme sometime it was like like the virgin uh doesn't read the book and doesn't participate in the discussion chad literally never reads the book but still participates heavily that was literally me I've skipped so many readings

that's Asha right there that's Asha I have better things to do there are so many books and so little time are you really expected to read the entirety of every single book my entire scholastic career was being in class and then being like, you have to do this reading.

And me going, no. And then just participating in the class discussion anyway. Because you don't have to. My favorite. Because the themes that you pick up in the classroom, the lecture is going gonna have all the themes anyway so like what's the point in reading the book unless they like so what happened in this particular section I'm like I don't remember I'm sorry

I just I managed to narrow it down to oh sorry I was gonna say the host of the lit podcast are saying don't bother to read it it's fine I mean what do you expect people to do I mean if you don you expect people to do? I mean – If you don't enjoy it, don't read it.

It's like who's going to read the entirety of The Wheel of Time? Like you can. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. I'm on that. I'm on book seven now. Yeah. Good luck. The only reason – there's a couple books to be fair.

The only reason they've read them is because we did them for the podcast. If it were not for the podcast – No, actually, I would have read at least the first couple Witcher books. I definitely, I mean, I did that. I made it through three Witcher books and I was like, yeah, I'm not reading the rest of these. But, you know, like Starship Troopers. Because they're good until a certain point.

Starship Troopers, I would not have read. Like, unless I made myself do it for this podcast. Because not only is it boring and has terrible politics it's also written terribly and so it doesn't have any redeeming features yeah going back so much better yeah well it's because the movie actually is a satire where the book is not um it like because the director had a sense of humor yeah yeah because paul verhoeven actually like understands things he understands that it's very funny unintentionally it's extremely unintentionally he didn't even have

to change much to make it funny he just put it on a screen well i mean his own words but he just like turned it up to he basically spinal tapped it he turned it to 11 and was like look how ludicrous this is um but like we going back we was one one where I was like, oh, I actually have to pay attention. I can't let this wash over me like some other books do. And I just sort of absorb it. I was like, oh, I have to listen. We're talking about integrals. Oh my goodness. I'm not going to lie. I didn't understand

that he was lobotomized at the end until you guys said he was. Yeah, that's the part of his brain. Because I have the lit. I have the lit. It lit open with it so it's it's that that's a that's a strategy of mine sometimes it's over in 1984 and the sometimes that's the only way in which i understand something if they hit me over the head with it yeah basically the surgery because they mentioned earlier in the book we're like we have this new surgery where it concentrates on a part of your brain

and we just zap the soul right out of you. And that's like, that's a lobotomy, bud. That's a lobotomy with extra steps. You got Rosemary Kennedy over here. Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ. It's on the Patreon. It's on the Patreon.

Oh, God. it's on the patreon it's on the patreon oh god which i'm not wrong here's the thing you're not they're not free but they are happy which begs the question all right i need an answer from each of you what's better being free or being happy i'll go first because it's easy What's better, being free or being happy? I'll go first because it's easy for me. It's being free because I don't think humans have the capacity to be permanently happy. I don't think our brains work that way psychologically. I think you need to be sad sometimes in order for the happy to actually work. I would say that. And also for me, like personally, I would say like religiously, the idea of like freedom and being able to make choice is like an intrinsic part of like nature to me.

So I would I 100 percent say that free is better than happy. OK, but let's say it was quite literally physically impossible for you to be to not be happy. Would you choose that state of being over being free? No. OK, fair enough for better okay though this is okay i'd rather just be free for the reasons that asha said and also because at that point i can make my own decision whether i want to just live in the outside world with the as they call them like the ape men in this book because like apparently people do that anyway so it's not like it's a huge deal um i think maybe if everyone started doing it it would be a huge deal yeah started just hemorrhaging population but i mean that was called the berlin wall that was a thing that existed true where a few people made i'd just rather be free

yep all right all right yeah i i mean it's the it's the good boy answer to say free and i and i still would say free i'm not going to play devil's advocate or anything um just because like in in a similar way to even if it was fundamentally possible to always be happy like that's not just from a philosophical point of view whether we're talking something zoroastrian or whether we're talking something absurdist like it's it's like you're the choice would still be free it's like suffering is kind of part of it in like a, not necessarily always a negative way. And it's like, obviously I'm not gonna claim it's positive,

but because there's plenty of suffering out there that doesn't end with positive growth. But it's also like the method through which people change and through which people grow in a lot of ways whether it's small sufferings or big ones yeah it's it's a it's a really complicated thing that is difficult it's difficult for me to answer because it's like my own life's kind of like um so it's like, but I would, I would still say free. I would still say free. Okay. How about the question? The more interesting question isn't whether I would prefer to be free or happy. The question is why would I choose freedom over being happiness all

the time? And I think you make an excellent point there just i think not being free is functionally the same as being dead that's yeah i mean that's um and i this is sort of my segwaying into my sort of pet critique of utilitarianism as an ethical system um did not come up this is something i think that zimyatin stole from the grand inquisitor section of the brothers garamato and it's another thing that i'm stealing from here so for those of you who don't know um in the grand inquisitor um roberto help me out here who's which one of the brothers is the atheist yeah evan so evan section of the book i've read yeah so evan tells uh a little fable jesus christ himself literally jesus himself, appears after 500 years of absence at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. And people react as you would have expected them to react.

I'm going to need your help for this one or better because I kind of forget how it goes a little bit. Yeah, so, okay, I can say it. I've read this enough times. So the story goes during the spanish inquisition jesus christ returns back from the dead to walk to walk with the masses and he's met by the grand inquisitor because he arrives in spain the people of course are reacting jesus christ is back this is amazing people are getting healed and the grand inquisitor says i'm sorry but you cannot be here anymore because we have this whole organization that needs to run and you being here messes that

thing up completely so we're going to kill you again and and then jesus christ is okay go ahead the grand inquisitor has like a little talk i don't think jesus ever replies really but he walks up to jesus and his cell and he says something to the effect of why on earth would you come here at a time like this when the people are so happy you ruined it for us and that's why we need to kill you again and i took away from that i don't know if dostoevsky intended this because it's hard to know what dostoevsky really believes in when he's talking through different characters in the brothers karamazov alia show is his shoe in yeah alia yeah, of course. I think if you, for those of you who don't know, utilitarianism is the belief that what is moral

is what makes the most people happy. And there are lots and lots of variations of this. And there have been utilitarians who have come up with pretty based ideas. For example, I think it was either Mills mills or ross's um veil of ignorance either one of those guys made the veil of india um veil of ignorance thought experiment which was you ought to design your society as if you are a baby about to be born and you have absolutely no idea you're going to be born into a rich family or a poor family or a white one or a black one or whatever the fuck if you design your society that way it will be just i think actually that

was definitely what i think it was rolls but ultimately my problem with this is i think if you followed utilitarianism to its logical conclusion the most moral thing to do would be to make it impossible for people to freely choose to do things that would cause them unhappiness. Yeah, you end up forcing people or preventing people from making bad choices. Right. So if your measure of a good society is happiness or productivity, for that matter, there is one thing it is not, which is freedom. that matter there's one thing it is not which is freedom so if you follow to its logical conclusion you will get to a society where everything is planned out perfectly productivity is maximized happiness is maximized any sort of deviation from that becomes heretical and then freedom becomes itself becomes heretical. I think.

And then it becomes a dystopia like we. And it's also deep down fallacious to think that you can plan everything out. You can't. Or that you can figure out precisely what is truly the most moral thing. Exactly. Because, again, with just base humanity, what makes me the happiest is different than what makes you the happiest is different than what makes anybody else the happiest. You know what I mean? As much as you try to generalize, the most people are made the most happy by the most activity. There's always people that, excuse me, will not be made happy by that

activity. Some people are happiest when they're miserable. Like some people enjoy inflicting that sort of thing on themselves. Like some people in, in, you know, in, in, we, everyone takes their like little, you know, government mandated walkies through the park. Like some people, some people hate touching grass and would not want to go on a government mandated walk. You know what I mean? Some people hate touching grass and would not want to go on a government mandated walk. You know what I mean?

Like no matter how much you try to generalize, it's like any of the social sciences, the more you tend to generalize an entire population, the less accurate and less useful the information you have is going to be. And so if your thing is, well, we need to make everybody happy, like making everybody happy in a group of two people is challenging enough. Like if you're trying to make the four of us happy all the time there's no single way to make all of us happy all the time because i'm you know i have terrible taste in the things i like to do so like what i like to do would not make the rest of you happy i don't know we play crusader kings a lot i'm about to say we're all gonna have to sit down and play crusader Kings for about 3,000 hours.

3,700 actually. I was highballing it and you just made it worse. You guys saying that makes me think there should be government mandated walkies. I have to say. Hey, look. I'm actually outside all the time because I walk my dog every day. My job gets me to 20,000 steps like at least four times a week. Really?

So, yeah. Desk jockey? Yeah, desk jockey. I got so fat, bro. Yeah, I mean – I'm also desk jockey. I've recently lost a lot of weight through the simple expediency of being too busy to eat lunch most of the time. And so instead of eating lunch, I just drink another 16 ounce coffee.

And then, you know, I I lost a lot of weight through the through the method of being too stressed to eat to eat enough. to eat enough. I've lost weight through the method of being too poor to buy food all the time. I need to point out for the listener, these are all variously not healthy ways to lose any of your weight. I don't

recommend them. The doctor-mandated way to lose weight, of course, is through amphetamines. Smoking meth, yeah. Yeah. Speaking of taking drugs, i have to point out this is another thing olgis huxley ripped off uh yes um not it doesn't take the form of drugs or state-mandated walkies um or sorry it does take the form of state-mandated walkies and state-mandated sex in uh in we but uh brave new world has soma which i think literally comes from the hebrew word for happiness soma is a lot of things actually um well soma is that that video game made by the creators of

amnesia the dark descent well on topic of drugs like smoking and drinking are highly illegal in the one state yeah i mean because there's that one scene where he goes to see i-330 for the first time you know before he he you know before he becomes her like lover boy and she's like yeah i going to start flirting with you. No, I'm not supposed to. And here's also some drugs and smokes and cigarettes. Drink up and smoke. We all love an assertive woman who breaks the rules,

gives us booze and cigarettes against our, against, you know, our better natures and encourage us to do the uh you know deviant activity we all love to see it and i'd like to point out cigarettes and alcohol kill a lot of people but you know what it also makes some people happy at least for a little while yeah yeah that's you almost you almost worded that the same as like the drill drunk driving tweet which was drunk drunk driving kills a lot of people but also gets a lot of people to work on time so who's to say if it's bad or not well look cigarettes and alcohol kill a lot of people they also make a lot of people really happy for a short amount of time. So who's to say,

well, the point is I'm not the one to tell you whether it's bad or not. Yeah. That's side note. Going back. Soma is also, uh, very prominent in the whole Vedic tradition of religions.

It was a drink that's in the Avesta. It's a drink that's in a lot of, um, I think early, early Indian texts as well. So it's the drink. It might be Sanskrit. Cause might be Sanskrit because it's in the Avesta. It's the thing that the priests would drink in order to enter the proper state to do their prayers and stuff. look a lot of those early in indo-aryan like uh religiousness eyebrows we're like in order to properly commune with the divine you need to be kind of fucked up which again i support listen

early like you know uh what is that tigris euphrates river valley civilizations all leave a bunch of texts about how they liked getting drunk. So yeah, again, I mean, wine comes. Yeah. I was going to say, you know who invented wine? Georgia. Hey, it's relevant. But like that, that to me then is just another one of the things with like the, you know, the state of, if you're going to make a society where everyone is happy all the time and like no one can get high you're kidding me what kind of what kind of happy

society is that please and also we're into the game we have a few and also like the elephants get high a lot of animals do a lot of animals get drunk they find fermented fruit on purpose but this i like we like we've talked about you know leading up to this the idea that like you can't regulate every emotion because humans are unpredictable and like we earlier we said humans are always going to find a way to fuck humans are always going to find a way to get fucked up oh yeah like like it's a very past time like that's what we'd love to do if we're sitting around in board we're like you know what i could do? I could get fucked up. Yeah. Like Russian, Russian history itself is a great example of that because all you have to do is look into

what Russian soldiers are doing in their various wars. You know, in like the Soviet Afghan war, they were like filtering like tank fuel and drinking it so they could get drunk because they didn't have any actual alcohol. Oh and it would like you know it could make you go blind but they would drink it anyway because it's the only way to get drunk and they were miserable and russian yeah and so like it was like these are russians if vodka was forbidden they drink something even nastier yeah and in the actual afghan war they were like taking this like alcohol somewhat alcohol-based like it was like tank fuel or something and like filtering it or they would like there was like a gel of some kind you could spread on toast and then burn and you could like scrape the burn off it it would remove some of

the chemicals and they would just eat it to get high like it'd still kill you but like you'd also be high shortly before it killed you so the uh this idea that a one state based in russia would have citizens who were not getting fucked up i think is you know a grave insult to like the russian national the slavic national character the ingenuity of the new soviet man yeah the new soviet man is getting drunk getting absolutely i mean insert that insert that propaganda post with the guy going hept or whatever like yeah yeah it's like oh that here's the thing like that russia for the longest part of this time pretty much all of its history has been basically in the grip of severe alcoholism the rates of alcohol oh yeah and domestic violence in Russia throughout its history

are petrifying. Well, we even have the story in Russian history where the guy who Christianized all of Russia, Vladimir the great literally did not become Muslim. Cause like, well, we can't drink.

I was going to bring that up. I didn't know if that's like, you know, if that's just what the popular folk tales are not but yeah it was like he was debating between between east you know eastern like like you know byzantine style christianity or islam it was like i believe yeah oh yeah so it's christianism yeah yeah and so it's christianity or islam and he's like well christianity that's us get drunk so i'm picking that one i think literally that was what do you say he's like quoted as lets us get drunk so I'm picking that one I think literally that was what he's saying he's like quoted as saying

the joy of the Russian people is drink something like that yes yes literally the same guy who then picked between Orthodox and Catholicism by going has cool things on top of the buildings yes yes that's awesome

that asshole. He's like, Hey, they've got cool swag on their buildings. I mean, it's really, it's a false steer. No,

it's because they sent German Catholics instead of Italians. Have you? Yeah. Look at the architecture in Rome. Oh yeah, that's true. It is really, it's solely because the Germans are incompetent at architecture.

Well, that's why the germans eventually became protestants they could be even more miserable on purpose yeah just so they're too practically minded to care about shit like beautiful buildings but i said earlier like some people just enjoy being miserable i was speaking of the germ. Yeah. That means you are on the official Tsar Power shit list, along with the English. Oh, no, they will be. They will be coming up soon. Wait, you're telling me there's a bad history between Germans and Russians?

I would have never... Don't tell me that. Long before the 1930s. We'll just say that. Long before the 1930s. It's coming up soon and it's with one of my favorite rulers so we'll find out what better than olga um let's see well is anyone better than olga for you come on that's what i thought but anyway the thing about Russia and alcohol is to understand Russia's relationship with alcohol.

So to make a lot of vodka, you need to have vodka factories. Vodka factories were given out by the Tsar to nobles who did nice things for him the same way you would give out land. It was like the main thing he gave away is like as like a token of favor right you can make vodka because you can make so much fucking money manufacturing vodka in russia and after the russian or prior to the russian revolution there was a lot of propaganda of bolsheviks destroying bottles of vodka and vodka factories but But you know, because they did get one thing, right.

They don't say that because they did get one thing, right. The Bolsheviks did hate fun. Hmm. Exactly. Well, the story doesn't end that way because you know, who ended up owning personally owning,

I should say many vodka factories, Joseph fucking Stalin. This is, this is the story of alcoholism in russia no matter what you do they want to drink i mean look i know it's like stereotypical but like the russians did have like the ussr did have a premiere whose like main characteristic was being like blackout drunk on foreign tours. So like, yeah, it's like, I mean,

other countries have alcoholics, but you don't have that many that were famous for like being that drunk in that many other countries. I'm that powerful of a position, you know? Yeah. Like who literally had to be rescued out of a river because they fell in face down and would have drowned if like a passing civilian hadn't pulled them out of a river.

Who regularly would call Bill Clinton to have him send cars to pick him up. Boris Yeltsin. Brendan, you'll hear all about those stories at the end of the show. Boris is a great character. He's not a good person, but he's a great character. He's fun. He's fun a good person, but he's a great character. He's fun. He's fun to learn about. Yeah, so

I think it's getting a bit long. It's getting to hour and 45. Yeah. The Berserk episode was, what, two and a half? Yeah, it was two and a half. That's because I did way more research. I'm not bad at this.

And also because it's a Berserk series. Yeah, it did way more research. This is a shorter series. It was way more dense. Yeah. Well, I did want to make one more observation. And that was the fact that dreams are a sign of mental illness. That was an interesting choice. I have questions about that. that was an interesting choice i i have questions about that because like is that is that just a thing he picked because it like sounds good for his one state or does that have

its roots in something does that have its roots it shows that you have freud because it shows you have an imagination imagination is bad it's an illness oh so it's just an outgrowth of imagining things okay yeah which i like that's the whole thing it's like an outgrowth of imagining things. Okay. Yeah. Which I like, that's the whole thing. It's like, which, you know, going back to the numbers, you can't have a square of negative one.

That's an imaginary number. Yeah. One state is like, you cannot have an imagination. His imaginations are bad for you. The sign of a look around, look around the gas, a soul.

I feel like we've been, even with this now, I feel like Ketho and I have been talking about the concept of the human soul for like weeks now, because we were also doing it across Cyberpunk month. Yeah. I mean, this is basically like proto-Cyberpunk, if anything. I mean, it is because it's dystopian. Like at base level, it's dystopian.

So yeah. Except Cyberpunk realized the truth, it's dystopian. So, yeah. Except Cyberpunk realized the truth that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the dystopia would come from capitalism, not its supposed opposite. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to hear about that, you can listen to our episodes where we talk about why Cyberpunk came from Japan specifically. Oh, apparently this also directly inspired the dispossessed by leguin yes yes well it's one of the ones they go through a list of things that

like you know either were inspired by it take allegories or things from it yeah and one of them one of them is definitely the dispossessed by slickhead Le Guin. Another one for other aficionados out there is Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut himself said that he happily ripped off Brave New World, which happily ripped off We. It's an actual quote from Vonnegut. Great artist steel. Yeah. But at least he said it. Yeah, he just admitted it.

Another fun one for fans of kind of terrible old movies. Yeah. But at least he, you know, he said it. Yeah. He just, he just admitted it. Another, another fun one for fans of kind of terrible old movies. This is also an inspiration on Logan's run. Was that the one where like, if you get, you're too like old, they, yeah, they kill you when you hit like 30 or something.

Oh, that's too young, man. No, it seems about right. Yeah. I was going to say, I was like,

I've been a bad, been a better person since 30, but my body has been definitely going downhill since then. So, you know, I mean, if I'm going to make another literary reference here while we're finishing, dare I make a reference to The Giver by Lois Lowry? Yeah. Another one. Another one in which everything has been homogenized to a sameness. They've even removed color from the world because color represents difference, which inherently means that things are not equal because they have different colors. You know, I never thought about this, but the late of heaven did that first two. Yes.

With the color, with that first two. Yes. With the colorlessness. Yes. You know, I hated The Giver as a kid when I was reading it because I just didn't understand it. I was like, what's going on? What do you mean no one can see color? What are you talking about? I actually quite like The Giver. I think it's fine.

I think it's fun. I also went to school in Texas. If I can bring in another literary reference, I did think of one last comparison and that is Dante's Inferno. And it's not what you would expect because recently I've sort of come to appreciate the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. And one of those things is sex or love and beauty. So around the time of the Renaissance, you see a lot of paintings and you might think, you know, for a church that is so interested in regulating sex through marriage and the family, there's quite a lot of sexy and naked people in these Renaissance paintings.

That was deliberate because Catholicism is not so anti-sex as much as it is just wants to put it into a little narrow box. put it into a little narrow box and the narrow box is that it has to be funneled ultimately to god from a sort of low kind of love to a high kind of love and dante's inferno also does that because just as it is in the case that um it's love and sexuality that ultimately gets d503 to rebel it's dante is love uh very low he admits lustful sexual love for beatrice is ultimately what leads him to ascend um the mountain of purgatory and spiritually purify himself so that he is worthy of heaven. I mean, is that our podcast? We stand low, lustful,

sexual urges on our podcast. Yeah. That's a good, that's a good thing. That's the difference. And it's sort of a good thing in Dante's Inferno, not in the same way, but it's similar that,

that, uh, it's interesting that that similarity was there. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, especially given the previous internal references to Dante's Inferno. Yeah, that's definitely the thing. My favorite thing about Dante's Inferno is the fact that he just like imagined a new version of hell and put all the people he didn't like in it, which I do enjoy. It is incredible. That's great. it's the best burn novel ever it's it's it's petty as dare i say petty as hell and i love i do love him for that it's like what if it sucked and all the people i hate were there yeah i'm going to craft the ultimate work of italian literature and it's going to be my self-insert where i put all

of the people i hate in hell to burn and suffer for all eternity and where the guy i admire just gets to be my homie like virgil just gets to be my yeah his senpai gets to be his homie it's just him hanging out one it's literally just fanfic and it became like a seminal work of literature. And I'd love him for that. You know, one of the things that got me into doctors in front of was actually the video game. Yeah.

They got that God of war rip off that I like more than God of war. Cause it actually has like a better character. It's just sillier and more charming oh god i yeah i i remember the i remember the promo video for that went pretty hard i always just think of the devil i just i just think of devil may cry 4 and i think of that stupid that the voice acting and i at the i wish i could have been the one to fill your dark. So I like screams that it's really terrible. So charming. Great memories.

If I were the, the, the, the, if I could make my closing thought here, I'm going to actually say something about we, which I also said about the first cyberpunk book we read. What the hell was that one?

Well, uh, Neuromancer. Neuromancer. Neuromancer. Is is that like do what i on its own be like you should just read this for fun they're probably not but i would say that if you want to read a work that becomes foundational for its theories and for like its themes and topics and like major ideas being carried forward like exponentially by other works in the same field that come afterwards then we is great for that like everything that is in we you see carried forward and other works that you know better and that was the exact same take takeaway i had from neuromancer

which is like it might not be the most fun to read but if you read it you're gonna like you're gonna do that like forehead slap of like realizing where all of the stuff you like and other stuff like was popularized and i got that exact same feeling from i'm kind of the opposite because i i okay here's the thing 1984 its ideas are cool all that about propaganda determining reality cool as as hell. I love that. But it's terribly written. All just Huxley Brave New World. Huxley Brave New World. I think the ideas he explores are... He ultimately comes to an incorrect conclusion, in my opinion.

But it was better written. This is best of both worlds. I think it was very well written. I enjoyed it way more than both of those. And I think the ideas it talks about are much more interesting than either 1984 or Brave New World. I honestly don't disagree. I think the book was really good. And if anybody listening for some reason didn't read it first and has now had it spoiled for them, you should go and read it because it's pretty good, especially if you're just into the idea of dystopias, because like Asha was saying, like there is a lot there that will get carried forward. So if you've already read other dystopias and like them,

you'll probably like this book. And at the same time, it's presenting a lot of ideas that you would see later. And a lot of ideas that are interestingly kind of absent, like the Taylorist thing coming to mind first in having a direct correlation to it as opposed to a multi-levels distilled like attachment to that. So, so pretty good. And I did want to say this just because I think, I forget who had mentioned, I don't know if the author intended this, but something I've been

learning after a year and how many months now, like a year and five or six, four or five months of of doing. A lot of reading. For this particular type of thing, I'm just coming to realize that authors intend a heck of a lot more than I always think they do. Annoyingly, our english teachers were kind of right yeah they were the curtains aren't just blue my guy they're blue because the characters yeah it's so so it's like i'm just coming to this and even with this one with those layers of references to other pieces of literature coming to understand how many of them are intentional.

And you go, wait a second. And you start realizing how well read a lot of these people were. Hey, in order to be a good writer, you gotta, gotta, gotta read a lot.

It's just part of the, part of the deal. No, absolutely. Just like my final thought is, I mean, I'm the one who recommended making this episode so and this is my third time reading this book so i'm kind of biased in saying

you know that i do like the book and i would recommend it based off of the ideas and everything but it's also one of these books that it makes a lot more sense when you kind of understand the history behind it so you know such as like what kethel did have that you know that chapter guide next to you when you're reading it so you can make sense of what's happening and picking up on those references because not everyone's going to know that when you know they mentioned the poet with the african lips that that poet is just a self-insert for alexander pushkin or you know because even reference pushkin in the novel was like oh oh, that guy who looks weird, but they reference him already with that poet who just wants to have his poetry told,

or even just like references to like the Bible, by just understanding, you know, who are these characters and what's going on with the one state, or just even understanding just like, you know, Zamyadin's life and what would lead him to write this. It just kind of helps with understanding everything and just all the references he makes. So I feel like this is a good book that if you're into like early Soviet history

or just even learning more about Zamyadin himself, it really does add to learning more about the novel, if anything. So read it. It's free online. It's public domain. The public domain version is a bit outdated with some of the terminology used because it was translated in 1924.

But as you will hear, or as you heard earlier with me quoting some of the lines that I read. But otherwise, give it a read. The worst thing that happens is you lose about seven hours of your time, because it's not a long book.

Yeah, I think it's still an incredibly relevant book today. That's all I have to say. It's distressing how often that happens with dystopic novels. Because no matter what, it is always suck balls. Yeah.

Yeah. The ultimate, the ultimate, uh, lesson of this novel. Oh yeah. And if you hyper-schedulize your life, you're going to hate it.

Yes. Generally. Do not worship your planner. Nope. Nope. Please don't. Alrighty. asha and katho where can people find you uh you can find uh both of us on twitter if you so which uh if you so wish um you can find me at uh it's herbo underscore anarchist you can find Ketho on the podcast account for our podcast, Sword, Sorcery, and Socialism.

I deactivated my Twitter account for my own mental health. You can find Ketho mostly running the show's podcast account at swords the letter N sock pod. And if you want to check out our podcast here about

cyberpunk or dark fantasy or all sorts of other things you can wherever you find podcasts yeah literally anywhere you can and we will link it as well also

if you want to check out the episodes that Brendan and I are in I'm on the Wheel of Time episodes and Brendan's on the Berserk episode. Yeah. So those are fun. They're both good episodes. Yeah. We had some good conversations in those. So thank you for having us on. We appreciate it.

This was fun. Thank you guys for coming. It's always a pleasure. Alrighty. And that's a dosvidaniya tovaryshi from me. And remember, vloshzhdayet parazitov bye bye