Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize winning The Gulag Archipelago is one of the most brutal reminders we have that the slippery slope is a dangerous place to teeter upon.
Solzhenitsyn’s work is a chilling historical account of what happens when violent ideology goes unchecked. It’s a real-world demonstration of Milgram and Zimbardo’s studies into blind obedience to authority and a comprehensive guide to fighting complicit evil – you must fight it long before they start knocking your door down in the dead of night.
This was also the most difficult podcast I have endeavoured to record to date. I’ve reread Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago for years, attempted to record a show once already and needed to scrap it. So what you are about to listen to is the result of untold hundreds of hours of deep thought regarding some of the most important facets of the human condition.
The Gulag Archipelago Podcast (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
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You may also enjoy the deep dives into Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Freud, and many more over at the Hardcore Literature Book Club.
Timestamps:
- 0:00 my history with The Gulag Archipelago
- 1:00 Solzhenitsyn and Orwell are read but not understood
- 4:00 my failed first attempt at a Solzhenitsyn show
- 8:00 publication and Nobel Prize win
- 9:30 “the line separating good and evil runs through every human heart”
- 10:30 how to understand the Great Books
- 11:20 on Jordan Peterson
- 14:00 the pictures of Solzhenitsyn pre and post arrest
- 15:30 the slippery slope argument, Zimbardo, and Milgram
- 19:00 the bystander effect and complicit evil
- 22:20 we raised to be blind to injustice
- 23:40 the night arrest
- 25:30 what can you do? When do you resist?
- 26:30 a big shock always start with a small shock
- 30:00 how to stand up against injustice
- 31:00 “the only way to win is not to play”
- 32:00 dehumanisation
- 33:00 how to effect positive change in the world
- 34:00 don’t go into politics… at least, not yet
- 36:00 finding and exploiting your unique talents
- 37:40 what happens when you lock up the innocent en masse?
- 39:00 there are wolves among us hunting for sheep
- 39:15 the binary of good and evil, light and dark, and the fallen Lucifer
- 40:00 you need to know evil in order to be good (Jung and Nietzsche)
- 40:40 “when you are fighting monsters, you must be careful not to become a monster”
- 41:15 “universal innocence may give rise to the universal failure to act”
- 42:55 Dostoyevsky’s mock execution and hard labour imprisonment in Siberia
- 44:15 “the murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder”
- 45:00 the type of parenting I respect
- 47:17 Abu Ghraib, “bad apples”, institutionalised evil, shit rolling downhill
- 48:00 why the Zimbardo Stanford Prison Experiment had to end early
- 48:30 crowds and the evil of masks
- 52:00 keeping one’s head down, going with the flow, and entropy
- 54:10 Solzhenitsyn’s arrest
- 56:00 Frankl and Solzhenitsyn’s words on the prison threshold
- 57:30 talking to a man who lived through the Blitz and the War Generation
- 1:00:00 the lady from the underground railroads resisting interrogation
- 1:01:17 who are the people responsible for mass evil?
- 1:02:13 “you today – me tomorrow”
- 1:04:30 “the line separating good and evil runs through every human heart”