David and Tamler continue their discussion of Dostoevsky's funny, sad, philosophical novella Notes From Underground. We focus on part 2 this time - three stories from the Underground Man's past - and explore what the stories tell us about his existentialist rants in part 1. Is he consumed with guilt over his treatment of Liza? Is he ashamed of his social awkwardness, low status, and self-destructive behavior? Or is he a narcissistic proto-incel suffering from an especially acute case of spotlight effect? (As usual, the answer is probably some combination of all these and more.) Plus, we select the finalists for our Patreon-listener selected episode. Thanks to everyone for their support!
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[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having
[00:00:06] an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.
[00:00:09] Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and
[00:00:14] knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.
[00:00:17] They fuck you, man! I'm fine! I'm alone out here. No woman. No kids. And no old friends.
[00:00:30] So that means I get to drink exactly as much as I want to.
[00:01:19] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.
[00:01:27] Dave, it's that time of year, the listener selected episode. What do you think our
[00:01:33] listeners are going to make you research for this one?
[00:01:36] Jordan Peterson's entire autobiography.
[00:01:39] How he grew from lobster at the bottom to lobster at the top.
[00:01:50] Looking over these suggestions, I was actually quite happy that none of them seemed, with the
[00:01:56] exception of that I'll get to, but none of them seemed too research-intensive for me.
[00:02:03] So on today's episode, we're going to, in the first segment, we're going to each list our
[00:02:10] favorite topics and then we will try to agree on five to six finalists.
[00:02:18] Last time we did this, we chose six finalists. Oh, and in the second segment,
[00:02:23] we will continue our discussion of Notes from Underground, incorporating part two
[00:02:28] into the discussion and that will conclude our Notes from Underground discussion.
[00:02:34] So the last time we did a listener selected episode, the six finalists. One was Ethics of Care,
[00:02:42] Feminist Critiques of Ethical Theory, that was in third place. Pedagogy and Teaching was one.
[00:02:49] That was towards the bottom. Implicit Bias, this came in second place.
[00:02:54] Moral Uncertainty, I think of the topic we eventually talked about with Will
[00:03:01] McCaskill. I think that was what was generating these people wanting us to talk about some of
[00:03:05] the stuff that he's been doing. Friendship was one and the Psychology of Personality,
[00:03:12] which was the eventual winner. Just beating out implicit bias. So we ended up doing
[00:03:17] three of those. Hopefully this will be as fruitful.
[00:03:24] Yeah, I think it might. We got a lot of suggestions.
[00:03:28] Yeah, we got like 125 suggestions.
[00:03:33] All right, so I've whittled my list down to about seven, but really one of them I think
[00:03:39] is more of an opening segment than a main segment, but I'll just throw it out there.
[00:03:45] Why don't you go first?
[00:03:47] All right, are we doing these in any order?
[00:03:50] I'm not.
[00:03:51] No, no. Okay, so self-deception. I actually think there's a lot to be talked about when it comes
[00:03:59] to self-deception that we've touched a little bit on motivated reasoning, but there is a
[00:04:06] I think a good conversation to be had about things like the above average effect,
[00:04:11] you know, why we seem so bad at assessing our own skills and abilities.
[00:04:16] And just conceptually what, how is it possible? Conceptually and psychologically,
[00:04:22] I guess self-deception really possible. What are we doing when we're deceiving ourselves?
[00:04:26] Do we at some level know? I think that would be the best part.
[00:04:29] I'm not sure I saw this one.
[00:04:30] Yeah, I should have kept the names of everybody. We will give credit.
[00:04:36] I have the names from who I chose.
[00:04:41] But anyway, that would be a good one.
[00:04:42] I like that. My first one is from Stephen Kinsey.
[00:04:49] Where's that denial of death episode, bitches? That book fucked me up for a year and a half.
[00:04:55] Is this podcast your immortality project? Without even knowing what an immortality
[00:05:01] project is in relation to denial of death, I can pretty much say yes.
[00:05:05] So this is the Ernest Becker denial of death, which you've read, but I have not.
[00:05:13] So I'd be interested in doing this.
[00:05:16] It would require reading a whole book.
[00:05:20] It's not a hard book to read, is it?
[00:05:22] No, no, no, it's not hard at all.
[00:05:23] And it's good.
[00:05:24] It is good. It was good when I read it in college though.
[00:05:29] You know, I haven't read it in a long time.
[00:05:31] So, but it's interesting.
[00:05:34] Self-deception, by the way, was Scott Harshbarger.
[00:05:40] Only because the people keep demanding it, Tamler.
[00:05:43] Yes.
[00:05:44] Star Trek.
[00:05:45] Wait a minute.
[00:05:49] You got to win another bet.
[00:05:50] I have to put it in just because there are a few mentions.
[00:05:55] I want to pay attention to the listeners.
[00:05:57] I want to give them what they want.
[00:05:58] These are our beloved Patreon supporters.
[00:06:00] If they want us to talk about certain episodes of Star Trek, then who are we?
[00:06:07] Who are we?
[00:06:09] In particular, there's an episode suggested by Dominic Dillulou,
[00:06:16] The Interlite.
[00:06:17] And yep, I'm interested too, The Interlite and Measured Man.
[00:06:21] Interlite probably being my favorite Star Trek episode of all time.
[00:06:24] Maybe for a Patreon bonus.
[00:06:26] How about that?
[00:06:27] I know.
[00:06:27] I knew, I knew.
[00:06:29] I'll do that though.
[00:06:30] I'll do it for a Patreon episode.
[00:06:33] But not for this.
[00:06:34] Okay.
[00:06:36] This was also a couple of listeners, one Sandro Whitwer
[00:06:41] and also Gary Flood.
[00:06:43] Both of them requested a Kafka story.
[00:06:49] And in addition,
[00:06:52] Kafka, I think in his will,
[00:06:58] expressed the desire that all his work be burned and not published.
[00:07:03] And his first translator went against that wish and published it.
[00:07:08] So the ethics of that might be a good way of leading into the Kafka story.
[00:07:14] Yeah, definitely.
[00:07:15] I had Kafka on my list.
[00:07:18] Yeah.
[00:07:19] So we just have to settle on the story, but that would be, I think,
[00:07:24] that would be really cool.
[00:07:25] Yep.
[00:07:26] This is one of those, there's a few episodes that we keep putting off
[00:07:32] and or at least it feels like we keep putting off.
[00:07:34] And one of them is just the ethics of how we care for animals.
[00:07:37] Like a direct, we had a couple, a couple ask us to talk about things like veganism and
[00:07:44] just the ethics of vegetarianism and animal care.
[00:07:47] Andre Griffin was the one who most recently suggested that,
[00:07:51] but I think there were two or three of those.
[00:07:54] Yeah, there were.
[00:07:56] That made my longer short list.
[00:08:00] But I'd be open to putting it on.
[00:08:02] We'll see if...
[00:08:04] I have some other ones I like better, so let's see, but we'll keep it on the back burner.
[00:08:09] Okay, this is from...
[00:08:10] Well, here's another one that we have been putting off for a while.
[00:08:18] This was also one of the finalists last time.
[00:08:21] So Alexander Zanny, when he's not posting on Reddit about how my audiobook sounds like shit,
[00:08:30] he makes some good suggestions.
[00:08:33] And this one is...
[00:08:35] He'd like to hear us talk about epistemic injustice and feminist epistemology more generally.
[00:08:42] Also, Gwyn Richards suggested ethics of care.
[00:08:48] So I mean we could do maybe both of those together.
[00:08:52] We might want to have a guest.
[00:08:54] I know some of this stuff.
[00:08:56] I did some of this stuff in my grad seminar on metaphylossophy,
[00:09:01] but I think feminist epistemology and ethics of care could be pretty cool.
[00:09:11] Yeah, I agree.
[00:09:13] And I think that's...
[00:09:17] You're exactly right.
[00:09:18] That's another one that's just been hanging there that we've managed to put off for a while.
[00:09:24] So there's this little suggestion that actually led me to think more about this general topic.
[00:09:34] And it was a suggestion about merging into traffic.
[00:09:41] Did you see this?
[00:09:43] So this is from Chad Michalik.
[00:09:47] He says...
[00:09:48] So it sounds like I wouldn't make an episode, right?
[00:09:51] But he says, is it better to merge at the last opportunity when you're merging on the highways?
[00:09:55] Is it better to merge at the last opportunity before the bottleneck?
[00:10:00] And he wonders whether this is a moral question.
[00:10:04] If the cars in front of you have already merged, is it ethical to go around them?
[00:10:08] And this got me to thinking that so much of my moral cognition is...
[00:10:15] If you were going to break down the percentage of times,
[00:10:18] it's not me wondering about whether abortion is right or wrong.
[00:10:21] It's more like that fucker cut in front of me in line,
[00:10:25] or like that asshole has like 20 items in the 10 or more item list.
[00:10:30] And there is something about unfairness in everyday life.
[00:10:33] That would be fine.
[00:10:34] 20 items in a 10 or more would be totally cool.
[00:10:39] You're okay with that?
[00:10:41] Well, if it's 10 or more, 20 is more than that.
[00:10:43] I mean, 10 or fewer.
[00:10:46] You're so clever.
[00:10:47] 10 or fewer items.
[00:10:52] But so unfairness in everyday life,
[00:10:55] or just even in general, the morality of everyday life?
[00:11:03] What actually gets under our moral skin in our everyday life?
[00:11:07] What is...
[00:11:08] Like somebody double parking, for instance.
[00:11:10] There's a whole bunch of...
[00:11:11] I think we could even do sort of a top five pet moral peeves episode.
[00:11:16] But I think we actually...
[00:11:17] Yeah, top five pet moral peeves maybe.
[00:11:20] Yeah.
[00:11:22] Yeah.
[00:11:22] Yeah, okay.
[00:11:23] Okay, this one seems really interesting,
[00:11:25] but I don't know anything about it.
[00:11:27] So this might be a Pizarro research, unless you know about it.
[00:11:32] But Marshall McCready or...
[00:11:34] I think an episode on the evolutionary psychological reasons humans think
[00:11:39] using conceptual binaries.
[00:11:42] Black, white, clean, dirty, left, right, etc.
[00:11:45] Why we map these binaries in the way we do?
[00:11:50] Why is black dark associated with dirty bad?
[00:11:53] And how such binaries affect our philosophical positions would be fascinating.
[00:11:59] For instance, does our psychological binary of static dynamic
[00:12:04] meaningfully relate to our philosophical differentiation of deontology from consequentialism?
[00:12:11] So what I don't know about...
[00:12:13] I love the idea of how these sort of artifacts of the way we have evolved
[00:12:20] or been culturally socialized affect our philosophical positions
[00:12:27] in ways that aren't transparent to us.
[00:12:29] So I think that could be really cool,
[00:12:32] but I don't know about this specific research surrounding the conceptual binaries.
[00:12:37] Do you?
[00:12:38] No.
[00:12:40] No.
[00:12:41] I think one of our episodes I went on a rant about dual process theory
[00:12:45] and just in the fact that we were fascinated by the number two.
[00:12:50] The closest I can think of, and this is...
[00:12:53] There is a literature on embodiment that argues
[00:12:59] that our concepts are heavily influenced by the kinds of bodies we have.
[00:13:03] And so one point in example always that we have a base 10 system
[00:13:08] and that's probably because we have 10 fingers, 10 toes.
[00:13:12] That's the most commonly sort of arrived at mathematical system.
[00:13:19] So you know, the episode, it could be interesting.
[00:13:22] It might be a lot of conjecture, especially in how this influences our philosophy.
[00:13:27] It might just be us sort of playing around with this idea.
[00:13:32] But yeah, I think it's interesting.
[00:13:33] Putting on our Marxist hats.
[00:13:35] Yeah.
[00:13:36] Yeah, so I don't know if we can do this if we don't know about that research, but...
[00:13:42] Are there any helpful readings maybe?
[00:13:44] Yeah, if Marshall, if you have any suggested readings,
[00:13:50] even if we don't put it on this finalist list,
[00:13:52] we'd definitely be open to doing this episode.
[00:13:55] So email us.
[00:13:57] We have not had any overlap yet.
[00:14:00] Kafka, we had Kafka.
[00:14:01] Oh yeah, Kafka, right.
[00:14:03] Yeah, one of the suggestions and I don't think we've actually done
[00:14:08] an episode on this, but you can tell me...
[00:14:11] Oh, I just lost my Patreon window is on hypocrisy.
[00:14:16] Have we done...
[00:14:17] Have we directly addressed hypocrisy?
[00:14:19] I had that same thought and I feel like we have.
[00:14:23] I really, really do.
[00:14:25] Like why hypocrisy bothers us, but it might not be.
[00:14:30] It literally might be like I saw a talk on it or I...
[00:14:34] Yeah, I don't...
[00:14:35] I feel like we might have mentioned it.
[00:14:40] We definitely didn't go to whole episode to it.
[00:14:43] No.
[00:14:44] A reading or something like that, yeah.
[00:14:46] Right, so there is like moral hypocrisy,
[00:14:52] but also just in general hypocrisy.
[00:14:54] This was suggested by Joe Pia Kuch.
[00:14:59] Pia Kuch, sorry.
[00:15:01] Joe.
[00:15:03] Hypocrisy, why it's unsettling, what that tells us about ourselves and the cause of our unease.
[00:15:07] You've talked about it before.
[00:15:08] He says we've talked about it before, but a thorough discussion would be edifying.
[00:15:12] There's even...
[00:15:13] There's some work on moral hypocrisy that might be interesting,
[00:15:16] but just hypocrisy in general.
[00:15:17] In philosophy too, like in philosophy and psychology.
[00:15:21] Yeah.
[00:15:22] Like we hate...
[00:15:24] I think we talked about a paper.
[00:15:26] It came up in a different context about
[00:15:28] how we hate moral hypocrites even if they are promoting something that's good.
[00:15:35] So for consequentialist reasons,
[00:15:37] it's actually good that they're being hypocrites if they influence other people,
[00:15:42] but we hate that more.
[00:15:43] We would rather that they didn't endorse something
[00:15:48] and didn't influence other people to do the right thing.
[00:15:52] So yeah, like it relates to some of your character stuff I think about how
[00:15:57] what we're really doing is evaluating characters a lot of the time.
[00:16:00] Yeah.
[00:16:02] Well, there you go.
[00:16:02] We've just taken care of the discussion for it.
[00:16:04] Yeah, that's it.
[00:16:06] There's your thorough discussion right there.
[00:16:10] Okay, so this is the one that I think might be better for an opening segment
[00:16:15] and could also possibly lead to my divorce.
[00:16:18] But Christine Caroline had a post...
[00:16:22] Yeah, on Patreon and then she also posted this on Reddit
[00:16:26] about polyamory versus adultery.
[00:16:30] She argued that adultery was more ethical than polyamory.
[00:16:35] So I guess polyamory would be a kind of open relationship that you would have with your spouse
[00:16:40] where you could have multiple sexual partners.
[00:16:43] And then she says that to her,
[00:16:46] a don't ask, don't tell policy for couples who live in different cities seems reasonable
[00:16:51] but complete transparency seems disrespectful.
[00:16:55] She just has kind of an aesthetic aversion to polyamory that it's just better to just,
[00:17:02] you know, if you're going to cheat on a spouse, just do it and not talk about it.
[00:17:09] Now she...
[00:17:11] I think she walked it back in Reddit because a lot of people jumped down
[00:17:17] were vehemently opposed to it saying that the honesty is what really matters.
[00:17:22] But I actually kind of agree with her that...
[00:17:26] And I also have this aesthetic aversion to a kind of people who have open relationships.
[00:17:32] But I think for different reasons maybe than she does.
[00:17:37] To me it sounds like you're, I don't know, trying to prove something.
[00:17:42] Or I don't know we should save this because I bet we could talk about it.
[00:17:45] I remember that I was talking about this with a friend of mine who's a psychologist
[00:17:50] and he said, because I expressed something, an equivalent sentiment that better to not know.
[00:17:59] And he said, that was insightful.
[00:18:01] So the reason that you prefer that policy is because you think that you will
[00:18:07] cheat on her but she won't cheat on you.
[00:18:09] Right, I think that's probably that's a good point.
[00:18:15] Or gets the self deception a little bit.
[00:18:18] Yeah, exactly. We could combine those two.
[00:18:28] That actually was one of the topics that I knew would lead me to have to do a lot of research
[00:18:32] because there is quite a bit written on this sort of stuff.
[00:18:36] But also it ties in nicely...
[00:18:37] On polyamory versus deltria or on polyamory.
[00:18:40] Or just on polyamory and sexual jealousy that like it's a big,
[00:18:44] it could end up being a big topic.
[00:18:48] You know, tie in to in general, somebody else suggested envy.
[00:18:53] It could, you know, the psychology of jealousy and envy might.
[00:18:56] Some people just claim to not be jealous at all sexually jealous.
[00:19:01] So...
[00:19:02] And I believe those people sometimes.
[00:19:05] Not always, but sometimes.
[00:19:06] But I still just there's something about that that, well then you don't really
[00:19:11] love the person or you don't really like, I don't know.
[00:19:17] And sometimes it just seems like they're trying to prove how enlightened and open minded.
[00:19:26] And I don't buy it.
[00:19:27] But this is all stuff we should say.
[00:19:29] I have two more.
[00:19:31] The first is Nathan P.
[00:19:35] Joe Henrich's cultural evolution research.
[00:19:38] And in particular, his concept of collective intelligence.
[00:19:42] I did a little sort of research into this and he has a few papers on it.
[00:19:46] And I know his new book is a lot about that.
[00:19:49] I thought that, you know, collective intelligence, that might be kind of interesting to
[00:19:55] dive into.
[00:19:55] It's not something I think we've talked about.
[00:19:58] Henrich came and gave a really great talk on his new book here at Cornell like last year.
[00:20:05] And it was just so full of interesting ideas.
[00:20:08] So maybe even, maybe not the whole book, but picking a chapter or two.
[00:20:13] Yeah.
[00:20:14] I mean, I've thought that for a long time that he's doing some of the most exciting research.
[00:20:20] If not the most exciting research of anybody.
[00:20:24] We had him as a guest, you might recall.
[00:20:27] Super early on.
[00:20:28] And then the last one.
[00:20:31] I have one more too.
[00:20:32] Yeah.
[00:20:33] It's on, this is Nathan Adé on the topic of authenticity.
[00:20:39] You know, that word can mean a lot of things and we've certainly discussed it before.
[00:20:43] But I think there could be something interesting about what it means to be authentic and why
[00:20:49] we like it or whether or not it's bad to be inauthentic, what it even means to be inauthentic.
[00:20:54] Do some conceptual analysis.
[00:20:56] Do some of the ex.
[00:20:58] Maybe we could just come up with a bunch of examples of inauthentic people.
[00:21:02] You can get it.
[00:21:03] Bob, the neuroscientist actually placed a chip in his brain where he's
[00:21:10] saying some of the things that he really believes, but he's only saying it because
[00:21:14] of the chip is he being authentic.
[00:21:16] Now there'd be some stuff like also on, you know, like true self stuff,
[00:21:22] which we have talked about, but you know, like do you see true self and authenticity as different?
[00:21:29] Right.
[00:21:30] You know, these are.
[00:21:31] There's a discussion that I think would be interesting about artists and what it means.
[00:21:38] Like so what we sort of hate it when an artist is not, you know,
[00:21:43] is pretending to be something that they're not or at least especially in some genres.
[00:21:47] Fronting.
[00:21:48] Yeah.
[00:21:49] You know, if you find out that somebody made up their whole sort of history just so they could sound cooler to write cool songs.
[00:21:56] You're just like what?
[00:21:57] I don't like their shit anymore.
[00:21:58] Right.
[00:21:59] Like and it's like, wait, their art hasn't changed.
[00:22:01] Right.
[00:22:02] So my last one is a combo Matthew Evans and Sam Trejo.
[00:22:08] So this is something that Paul Bloom, one of them mentions Paul Bloom on waking up with Sam Harris.
[00:22:15] And it says Sam Harris asked him what from the giant body of psychology literature could one use to become a better parent.
[00:22:24] And Paul said nothing.
[00:22:28] Now I know because I remember the first time I met Paul actually, we were at a bar and I didn't know him at all.
[00:22:34] And he's, he launched into this sort of rant about how parents have no influence on their kids.
[00:22:42] Like how you, what your kid's character is going to be like doesn't like how you are is totally meaningless.
[00:22:50] What really matters is their peer group and a lot of people had a, were pushing back on it.
[00:22:58] And now that I have a 14 year old, I also now push back against that idea.
[00:23:06] And I want to know what he's basing that on.
[00:23:08] Yeah. So actually there is a book called the nurture assumption that was written by Judith Rich Harris who recently passed away, actually.
[00:23:18] And she's just an interesting person. She was just a textbook writer who had never sort of made it in the world of academics.
[00:23:24] I don't know if she wanted to or not, but she was just plugging away writing textbooks and in writing these textbooks,
[00:23:30] she was like, you know, all this work on parenting is just so it's just correlational and bullshit.
[00:23:36] Like good parents have, you know, if it boils down to good parents have good kids, then it's genetics.
[00:23:42] But then if it's environment, it's pretty clear that the parents aren't really doing most of the work.
[00:23:48] It's the peers. So we could dive into that book.
[00:23:52] Like I want to know what the research is. We could have Paul on for this maybe, but I want to know what makes people who say this so confident that it's true and what they really mean.
[00:24:04] Because obviously, you know, you see a lot of fucked up people in this world, adults, and often it seems to trace to parenting issues when they were growing up, anxiety and a lot of, or at least it appears that way.
[00:24:21] To from my unscientific eye. So I would talk about that and then, you know, I think one of them said, you know, this could lead into a discussion of parenting in general and maybe some dilemmas that we've each faced.
[00:24:38] But yeah, I want to dive into this because I go in probably with motivated skepticism.
[00:24:49] And I feel like I was influenced very much by my mom. And I know that that's like correlation and it could be my genes and.
[00:24:58] Right, that's the big, you know, the two pronged argument of the behavioral. So we'd have to go into maybe some of the behavioral genetic stuff.
[00:25:07] And that almost made my list for the very reason that I was like, oh man, this would require actually reading.
[00:25:14] But you know what, like unlike, you know, some of the other stuff where it's so clear that you're the one that has to do it.
[00:25:22] I think that I would you would take this on. Well, I don't know if I'd fully take it on, but I would do my part, you know.
[00:25:30] Well then that's made my top five.
[00:25:34] All right. So let's let's let's narrow this down to five. So are we good for that one?
[00:25:40] Yeah, we're good with that one.
[00:25:41] Ethics of parenting and how much do parents make a difference?
[00:25:45] Yep. I think. Yeah. So hypocrisy did with that one make our list.
[00:25:52] Oh wait, so let's just for sure the ones that we I think both.
[00:25:58] So I think the parenting one, I think the feminist epistemology one.
[00:26:02] Ethics of care.
[00:26:04] I think that denial of death or just that existential psychology in general.
[00:26:08] Okay, so those were the three that were on your list that I would would put that I can think of.
[00:26:14] I like self deception.
[00:26:16] Yeah, self deception for sure.
[00:26:18] I think that would be fun.
[00:26:21] So that's four, right?
[00:26:23] Yeah.
[00:26:24] I mean, if the polyamory and adultery and versus if there's a literature about that, it could be a main segment and not a jokey opening segment.
[00:26:37] You know, yeah.
[00:26:38] And that actually might be really good to have a guest for like somebody who actually does an open relationship.
[00:26:46] Yeah, or research is that that stuff.
[00:26:50] Diana Fleischman actually suggested and someone suggested I mean we've thought about having her on.
[00:26:58] I think that might be fun.
[00:26:59] She's really great.
[00:27:02] Would that beat out animal ethics free ethics of animals?
[00:27:06] I think if we put Kafka on it won't win like we can just do Kafka talked about it so I could I could move that out.
[00:27:16] I think if we want to do it will do it.
[00:27:18] We clearly seem to do these literature stuff like what we're having fun in the recent episode.
[00:27:25] I think a moral like top moral pet peeves would be a good opening segment but maybe not.
[00:27:32] Yeah, that would be a good opening segment actually.
[00:27:35] So that would leave animal ethics.
[00:27:40] So we have five if we do feminist epistemology denial of death self deception parenting and polyamory that's five right there.
[00:27:46] We don't need to put animals.
[00:27:48] Oh, so we're going to include polyamory.
[00:27:50] Yeah, that would be fun actually.
[00:27:52] Yeah, polyamory.
[00:27:53] All right.
[00:27:54] Let's do it.
[00:27:55] Let's do it.
[00:27:57] Yeah, are we not going to do animal ethics?
[00:27:59] To me it was down to either polyamory or animal ethics.
[00:28:02] Okay.
[00:28:04] If we put right.
[00:28:11] Polyamory would be more fun.
[00:28:13] Yeah, it might be fun.
[00:28:14] So are we do it?
[00:28:15] We could throw animal ethics on there for the sixth thought like we had six last time we could do six this time if we're struggling.
[00:28:23] Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:24] I was going to say if we're picking between polyamory and animal ethics, the real question is what would you rather listen to Tamler be defensive about for an hour?
[00:28:36] Yeah, I mean like you could combine animal ethics because then there's also being polyamorous with the animals.
[00:28:45] Well that's wrong.
[00:28:46] I mean I feel like everybody's intuition is pretty strong on that.
[00:28:49] I don't even know what the discussion would be like you can't fuck two dogs.
[00:28:54] You have to be committed to a dog.
[00:28:57] Dogs have nothing if not loyalty like that was just be completely wrong.
[00:29:06] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.
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[00:31:53] Okay now we're going to continue our discussion of Notes from Underground Part 2.
[00:32:02] The way we left it I had said that I think once you read part 2 it makes you look at part 1 differently.
[00:32:12] It makes you look at the underground man differently and make you look at that whole position that's being outlined in part 1 just really briefly.
[00:32:22] So in part 1 the way the underground man frames it is he's trying to figure out why he has this trait where he will positively enjoy humiliating himself.
[00:32:39] He will positively enjoy his degradation.
[00:32:44] The answer to this question is that he is living in a society and a world that embraces a deterministic worldview according to which once we understand the laws of nature using science and reason
[00:33:06] we will set up society in such a way that human beings always act to their own advantage.
[00:33:14] Right now human beings act against their own self-interest but that's just because they're not enlightened.
[00:33:21] We now or soon will have a way of enlightening them to their true interests and so then they will always act in that direction in the interests of themselves and the interests of society.
[00:33:36] And he considers his perverse actions, his capricious actions, his acts that are so plainly go against his own self-interest.
[00:33:48] That is his way of affirming his freedom from this worldview.
[00:33:54] And he's saying that once enlightened to their true interests they will act in a way that's oriented towards those interests.
[00:34:02] And he's saying no we won't.
[00:34:04] Human beings aren't wired that way.
[00:34:07] We will always act perversely.
[00:34:09] We will always act in ways that go against our interests just to assert our own freedom, just to assert our own independence from these laws.
[00:34:20] So it was kind of, as we discussed last time, he was kind of painting his perversity and his pathologies in a somewhat heroic light,
[00:34:30] heroic maybe from an existentialist point of view.
[00:34:34] And I think in part two you start to see this maybe as delusional.
[00:34:44] This is a very frustrated man consumed by guilt, consumed by loneliness and alienation.
[00:34:57] And he wants to make sense of that and in order to justify himself and his existence he has come up with this fairly grandiose idea.
[00:35:09] That's one of the things that I wanted to talk about is this idea that all that philosophy in part one is, one way to read it is,
[00:35:21] it's a rationalization of a life gone terribly wrong.
[00:35:26] A life that was never right to start with and that just kept getting worse and worse.
[00:35:32] He thinks that subjecting himself to suffering, he discusses his toothache like why he enjoys having a really bad toothache.
[00:35:43] To him it livens him up, it reminds him that he is conscious and that his consciousness to him is the one thing that's not part of this stupid determinism, this two times two makes four.
[00:35:56] And you know if there's one thing you would think we were biologically wired to do is treat a toothache if we can.
[00:36:03] God knows you and I would be begging every dentist we could find for Vicodin or Porcassette or something like that.
[00:36:10] When you want it they never give it to you.
[00:36:13] Dentists are like come on dentists.
[00:36:16] Fucking dentists.
[00:36:17] God damn it.
[00:36:18] Be cool.
[00:36:20] So did we say that the part one is, we mentioned that he's 40 in his discussion of how it's perverse to have lived that long.
[00:36:31] Bad matters.
[00:36:32] Bad matters, that's right.
[00:36:33] But part two is the actual story takes place 20 years before so he's recounting events from 20 years before.
[00:36:43] And that's so sad, right?
[00:36:46] He's still obsessed by these memories that he's describing in part two.
[00:36:52] So then what you realize is what he's describing in part two happened 20 years earlier than what he's saying in part one,
[00:36:59] which I think that's why it has to change the way you think of part one because you're now seeing what led to that.
[00:37:10] You could read part one and think, well he's a little crazy but he really is shaking his fist at the universe.
[00:37:16] And when you actually see what that entails it's like as you said it's a justification for the most trivial acts of cowardice maybe?
[00:37:31] I don't know.
[00:37:32] It's like a...
[00:37:33] And also cruelty which is I think cruelty.
[00:37:36] Which is what's tormenting him the most.
[00:37:39] Both the humiliation and also just I think guilt for how he treated Liza.
[00:37:44] Right.
[00:37:45] And that he can't forgive himself for that.
[00:37:48] So just why don't we give just a brief summary of what happens in part two?
[00:37:54] The Underground Man describes three events in his life.
[00:37:58] The first is sort of a standalone event that describes his obsession, his weird obsession.
[00:38:04] Although weirdly understandable and relatable with an officer that he crosses in the street and who never moves away.
[00:38:12] Like when they're walking toward each other, the officer never is the one to move.
[00:38:17] And he feels as if he's being totally slighted on purpose.
[00:38:22] So he's obsessed with getting revenge on this officer.
[00:38:25] But the officer really doesn't even notice what's happening presumably.
[00:38:30] The second story and the third story tie in together temporarily.
[00:38:36] The second one is just the Underground Man sort of invites himself to a party.
[00:38:43] He goes to visit a quote unquote friend from his school days.
[00:38:48] They're planning a retire...
[00:38:50] Going away party for a friend.
[00:38:52] He manages to invite himself even though they clearly don't want him to go.
[00:38:56] They go to a bar, Underground Man gets increasingly drunk and again views lots of things as insults when they might not be.
[00:39:05] But also his friends are getting tired of him.
[00:39:07] His friends didn't want him to come.
[00:39:09] Just didn't want him to come. It's pretty clear.
[00:39:12] And like the more that they expressed that they didn't want him to come, the more sort of he intrudes on it.
[00:39:17] Even to the point of making it so important for him to go.
[00:39:22] Despite them not coming that he's willing to use the little bit of money that he has left and not pay his servant.
[00:39:29] They sort of increasingly ignore him.
[00:39:31] He's increasingly getting drunk and he is increasingly feeling insulted and ignored.
[00:39:36] And you've had a good life if you can't relate to this experience to some degree.
[00:39:42] I felt like he's tapping into something.
[00:39:45] It's never been that bad for me, but he's tapping into something that is...
[00:39:50] That just where you kind of have a sense that you're not wanted and there's nothing you can do about it.
[00:39:58] And so you're drinking more and you're...
[00:40:01] So his friends end up ditching him and going to a brothel.
[00:40:05] And he's like, well I'm gonna go follow them anyway.
[00:40:09] So he figures out where they're going and follows them.
[00:40:12] But they're already presumably in rooms with their respective dates.
[00:40:19] And so he actually encounters a young prostitute named Liza.
[00:40:26] And they... I don't think it's exactly stated, but they presumably have sex and then they get into a conversation.
[00:40:35] In the conversation the underground man is just being kind of an ass and he's pretty much telling her that her life is shit.
[00:40:41] And it's like she's never... She's not gonna be pretty forever and her life will end in tears.
[00:40:47] But he's also at times acting like he cares about her and wants her to do something better with her life.
[00:40:54] But the more he talks, the more A that doesn't seem possible for her.
[00:41:00] Her father sold her into this prostitution.
[00:41:06] But he is taking a pose of a gentleman that is kind of moralizing to her about what she's doing to her life.
[00:41:17] Right, right. And he then feels guilty about what he's been saying to her.
[00:41:24] He sort of goes back and forth as you say, sounding like somebody who really cares and not.
[00:41:30] And finally he just sort of really apologizes and lays it all out.
[00:41:33] Liza has made herself vulnerable to him and he just tells her...
[00:41:38] The one thing about underground man is he seems to have introspective access.
[00:41:43] He seems to have insight into why he is how he is.
[00:41:46] He just sort of ignores at times.
[00:41:48] He actually says that he's just horrified by his own poverty and he's embarrassed at himself.
[00:41:55] He just lays out how pitiful he is and she embraces him.
[00:42:02] She feels sorry for him.
[00:42:04] And then it could end really well with this tender moment of connectedness between these two people.
[00:42:12] And he just fucks it all up by stuffing money into her hand.
[00:42:17] No, hold on. You're running the things together.
[00:42:21] So what happens at the night, that concludes with him giving her his address and saying that she should come.
[00:42:29] And then I think what you're talking about...
[00:42:33] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sorry.
[00:42:35] That's right.
[00:42:36] What you're talking about happens at his apartment.
[00:42:38] That's right. She visits him at his apartment.
[00:42:40] And that's where he lays himself bare to her, as you said.
[00:42:44] And where he does the thing that is I think the single thing that he can't forgive himself for,
[00:42:53] which is taking this person who trusted him and putting money in her hand in the most contemptuous way
[00:43:03] after they have opened themselves up to each other in ways that he never thought possible
[00:43:10] and in ways that he's never done before or since.
[00:43:13] And you get the sense that the whole underground...
[00:43:17] That he's been thinking about it for 20 years and his whole philosophy is a way of trying to justify it.
[00:43:24] Right, and...
[00:43:25] Or explain it.
[00:43:26] And you really...
[00:43:27] It really is a poignant moment, right?
[00:43:30] He's gone back and forth from treating her like a human being and insulting her.
[00:43:34] Seems to understand what his own problems are.
[00:43:36] But it really is clear that shoving the money into her hand is kind of the worst thing you could do to a human being
[00:43:45] who you've just sort of experienced this bond with.
[00:43:48] We'll talk about it because I have a lot to say about how he describes putting money in her hand.
[00:43:55] It's very different than how he describes all these other ways that he's done things that either humiliated him
[00:44:03] or degrades him or that are immoral or just totally antisocial.
[00:44:10] The way he describes this is different, but we'll talk about that later on.
[00:44:15] Right.
[00:44:16] So it goes from potentially being an existentialist affirming of myself and my identity as a human being in this horrible universe
[00:44:29] to being a cruel and narcissistic hyper-focus on one's own life,
[00:44:38] thinking that the world revolves around him in a way that is even he knows.
[00:44:45] It kills him that nobody notices him, but yet he thinks that somehow everybody secretly does
[00:44:54] that the whole world is a plot against him.
[00:44:57] Yeah, right.
[00:44:59] And what you said last episode about it seems like the ravings of an incel.
[00:45:05] I mean, that seems to, I don't know, trivialized to some extent this anguish that he's feeling,
[00:45:14] but I think it only trivializes it just because of the stereotype of what an incel is.
[00:45:21] Right?
[00:45:22] Yeah.
[00:45:23] I think that there's probably a lot of similar kind of anguish that is being tapped into there.
[00:45:30] Absolutely.
[00:45:31] And I think that a lot of these people aren't living in alienated and painful existence.
[00:45:36] Right?
[00:45:37] As I reread this to record this part, I was like, this really does sound like a shooter.
[00:45:45] Like it sounds like the inner life might be of somebody who everybody described as a quiet person who kept to himself,
[00:45:54] but who has this fantastical inner world where the whole world is so against him that he might actually end up doing something about it in a way that would be completely unexpected.
[00:46:05] Yeah, you know, I think Russia had this kind of person at the time and sometimes it would come out in like a lot of the terrorism that would take place, the bombings on the part of the nihilists, bombing train stations.
[00:46:23] We believe in nothing.
[00:46:25] Well, yeah, their nihilists didn't believe in nothing.
[00:46:28] Their nihilists are like they have very strong particular beliefs.
[00:46:33] They're just against the kind of Christian dominant idea, Russian ideology that was prevalent at the time.
[00:46:45] One thing that I noticed going through this again is that it is full of contradictions and I read these part two.
[00:46:55] There are so many illusions in part two to so, so again, he's rebelling against the deterministic conception of human beings in part one.
[00:47:07] And in part two, he is constantly talking about how he is impelled or faded.
[00:47:15] There are so many deterministic descriptions of why he degraded himself in these ways that are described at the story.
[00:47:26] Interesting. I hadn't put that together.
[00:47:29] So let me just give a couple of examples.
[00:47:31] So he says, every decent man in our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition.
[00:47:38] I am profoundly convinced of that. He has made that way and is constructed for that very purpose.
[00:47:45] That is the law of nature for all decent people on earth.
[00:47:50] So he starts out right there talking about this is a law of nature. You are constrained.
[00:47:55] You have to be. It's necessary that you're going to be a coward.
[00:47:59] In the second story, he knows it's going to be bad for him to go to a dinner that he invited himself to with people who don't respect him and that he doesn't respect.
[00:48:09] And so he says, of course the best thing would be not to go at all.
[00:48:14] But that was the most impossible of all.
[00:48:16] Once I feel impelled to do anything, I am completely drawn to it head first.
[00:48:22] So again, there's that deterministic thing.
[00:48:26] And then afterwards when he's already humiliated himself beyond anything that most people experience, he still follows them to this whorehouse.
[00:48:39] And he's deliberating in this carriage like what am I doing?
[00:48:44] You get the sense he could stop himself from doing it and then he says to himself,
[00:48:49] No, I have to. This is fate. I have to.
[00:48:52] And there's so many examples of this.
[00:48:54] He talks about with Liza a spiteful feeling took possession of me.
[00:48:59] And then the most dramatic example, the one that is I think the climax of the book is when he breaks down in front of Liza and he says they won't let me.
[00:49:10] I can't be good. I can't be a good person. It's not possible for me.
[00:49:16] So he is just systematically going against this idea that he is rebelling against the deterministic understanding of human beings.
[00:49:29] He's not I don't know about excusing it himself, but explaining his behavior as necessarily caused.
[00:49:37] Yeah. And so much so that there's very little language of agency as he's describing his own behavior.
[00:49:48] So he says, you know, sometimes I was unwilling to speak to anyone, to anyone other times I would talk a lot.
[00:49:55] And then all my fastidiousness would suddenly for no rhyme or reason vanish.
[00:49:59] It's like it's happening to him.
[00:50:01] He's relating what what's going on, not choosing.
[00:50:06] That's right. It's happening to right. That's how he described. That's how you that's how it's exactly in it.
[00:50:12] And and he clearly feels so sorry for himself.
[00:50:18] You know, in this in this super super self-centered way like he's it's full of self pity that he is thrust into this circumstance of he fantasizes about like everybody respecting him.
[00:50:32] You know, that's like that's what he jerks off to like people moving for him when he's walking down the street.
[00:50:38] You know, the other.
[00:50:41] I mean, but but I think it is a.
[00:50:45] That feeling where nobody is even taking the time to notice your existence.
[00:50:53] He worries about challenging the officer to a duel that he just won't accept it.
[00:50:58] And at the dinner with those people, like he's like I apologize for insulting you and they're like, you're not even at the level where you could insult me.
[00:51:07] Right. You know, like that's.
[00:51:09] I mean, I got it. That's got to be hard as although the way that I read it is to me a misunderstanding of what everybody else feels.
[00:51:21] So he says at one point I'm alone and they are everyone.
[00:51:24] Like I think that what he's suffering from is this that feeling that, you know, the first day of school where you it feels like everybody must know each other and you don't know anybody.
[00:51:35] But in reality, everybody is feeling that like all he has is his inner life.
[00:51:40] Like he thinks that when somebody walks by him and doesn't say hi, it's because he is less noticed than any other human being.
[00:51:48] But in fact, I think that's just everybody's experience.
[00:51:52] You know, you said this in the last episode. I don't totally agree.
[00:51:57] Like I think he is less noticed than most people and partly this is just because, you know, he's socially, socially maladjusted.
[00:52:09] And like I mean, I do think he definitely suffers from what you're talking about.
[00:52:16] But those four friends that go out to dinner, like they notice each other.
[00:52:21] They don't act that way to each other the way they act to him.
[00:52:25] Right. So so he definitely is lonely and has no friends.
[00:52:30] This is part of the I think great writing of Dostoevsky that it is an unreliable narrator.
[00:52:42] We have no way of knowing whether in fact or imagine you and I like imagine someone coming up to us and saying like I have.
[00:52:50] I've walked by you 20 times and you've never ever said hi and and we'd be like, I didn't see you like you're not particularly invisible.
[00:52:59] It's just that you've never even said anything to me.
[00:53:01] But the issue wasn't that he didn't say hi.
[00:53:04] The issue was that, you know, in that thing on the street where one of you has to move out of the way.
[00:53:11] He didn't even he lost the game.
[00:53:14] Yeah, exactly. He lost a game of street chicken and it was like it wasn't that the person won the game.
[00:53:23] Person didn't even think there was a day.
[00:53:25] But you're right.
[00:53:27] Like I think you're right.
[00:53:28] Like at that dinner, maybe if he hadn't been convinced that they were all secretly presenting him being there and thinking bad thoughts about him,
[00:53:39] it could have gone better.
[00:53:41] But they didn't want him to come to the dinner.
[00:53:43] It's pretty clear that they didn't want him there, you know?
[00:53:47] Yeah, definitely.
[00:53:50] And I think it's good that we don't get their perspective.
[00:53:54] Right?
[00:53:55] Like we this is all the internal musings and there's no doubt that he is magnifying his causal role in the world.
[00:54:08] While at the same time lamenting that he has no causal like like role in the world.
[00:54:14] That's right. He's like epiphenomenal.
[00:54:17] The other thing that is hard to to ignore and it's very it seems very purposeful on to CSU's part is to keep having him talk about how smart he is in a way that is.
[00:54:31] Yeah, it's it is I think we all know people like this when he's talking about being.
[00:54:37] Everybody's a coward and a slave.
[00:54:40] And he's like I was too, but but I was just smarter and I so I realize it like I'm smarter than all these sheeple and so he's always talking about how well read he is and how much more intelligent and people probably resent me because I'm so intelligent.
[00:54:55] Yeah.
[00:54:56] And this this actually has a tragic culmination to so there's one time where he doesn't blame like being impelled or he says this was after he lies of the prostitute.
[00:55:15] He puts money in her hand when she was making a very loving gesture to him and he was and he says I meant to lie a moment ago to write that I did this accidentally not knowing what I was doing through foolishness through losing my head.
[00:55:31] But I don't want to lie so I will say straight out that I opened her hand and I put the money in it from spite.
[00:55:38] But then he backs off that it came into my head to do it while she was running up and down the room and she was sitting behind the screen.
[00:55:45] But I can say this for certain though I did that cruel thing purposely.
[00:55:50] It was not an impulse from my heart.
[00:55:53] It came from my evil brain.
[00:55:55] The cruelty was so affected so purposely made up so completely a product of the brain of books.
[00:56:02] So that's where he's sort of that's the tragic culmination.
[00:56:05] It's like my book learning here is not something I'm boasting about empty in this empty boasting way.
[00:56:15] It's what made me do the thing that I feel most guilty about and then I can't get over 20 years later.
[00:56:23] I wonder what kind of books made him do that.
[00:56:26] But yeah it is clear that he has this very rich fantasy life about being a protagonist in one of these books where he wins the challenges.
[00:56:39] Somebody do a duel for honor and wins it and he can't even get himself in situations where he might act honorably.
[00:56:47] Or just have somebody accept a duel for him.
[00:56:50] He's too low to accept a duel.
[00:56:52] Yeah.
[00:56:53] Again I don't feel like the reality would be that he's too low to accept a duel.
[00:56:59] It's just that from somebody else's perspective he's built this up for months and months.
[00:57:04] But the other person is just playing pool and gets bumped.
[00:57:09] And then someone challenges you to a duel you'd kind of feel sorry for them.
[00:57:13] You'd be like no dude I'm not gonna do it.
[00:57:16] Yeah no and pity is the thing that he feels like the most insulted by and the most threatened by.
[00:57:24] The idea that these people are they don't...
[00:57:28] Yeah it is ultimately a lack of respect in that I hesitate to say Kantian sense where the person regards you as an equal.
[00:57:37] But people don't.
[00:57:38] Or at least that's his worry. They don't regard him as a...
[00:57:41] It's his worry but he's done nothing to elicit people's treatment of him.
[00:57:46] He is a loner.
[00:57:48] He's not engaged in relational any effort to actually build relationships with people that would even allow for them to show him respect.
[00:58:01] And then like yes and anytime there is a possibility of that like with Liza he acts in a way that just makes it...
[00:58:10] Just awkward.
[00:58:11] Never happened. No not awkward like worse than awkward just...
[00:58:15] No I'm imagining him as awkward I think in my head like as like as somebody who socially would make everybody else so uncomfortable around him.
[00:58:26] Yeah right there and there are people like that and it's sad you know there are people who just don't feel comfortable in their own skin.
[00:58:35] And human beings don't like to be around people like that.
[00:58:39] Yeah there's a sentence that I read and for some reason I really like the way he describes himself.
[00:58:47] His cowardice he says.
[00:58:48] Don't imagine though it was cowardice made me slink away from the officer.
[00:58:51] He's talking about playing street chicken with the officer.
[00:58:54] I never have been a coward at heart though I have always been a coward in action.
[00:58:59] Where it's like wait what exactly...
[00:59:03] Are we defining this?
[00:59:06] Your point about unreliable narrator is also totally right and there's a little section where he's talking about going to one of these people who will like when he just can't take being alone anymore
[00:59:20] and he craves social interaction he goes to this person's house and he has these two daughters.
[00:59:26] And he says I was terribly embarrassed for the girls because they were always whispering and giggling to each other when I was there.
[00:59:33] And it's like what do you think they're whispering and giggling about?
[00:59:37] And yet you're embarrassed for them.
[00:59:40] That's a classic unreliable narrator right there.
[00:59:47] It's like we get that they're making fun of him and whatever awkward thing he's doing but he sees it as he's embarrassed for them.
[00:59:54] Yeah so it's such a...
[00:59:56] It is a study in defense mechanisms too.
[00:59:59] He says at some point he decides that officer who keeps disrespecting him by not moving out of the way.
[01:00:08] This is one morning though I had never tried my hand with a pen it suddenly occurred to me to write a satire on this officer in the form of a novel which would unmask his villainy.
[01:00:17] Like this guy's a villain for like...
[01:00:20] And he wrote the novel with relish.
[01:00:23] He says I did unmask his villainy.
[01:00:26] I even exaggerated it.
[01:00:28] At first I saw altered his surname that it could easily be recognized but on second thought I changed it because you know he's not going to stoop to that.
[01:00:36] And so he sends it to whatever publication and he says but at that time such attacks were not the fashion and my story was not printed.
[01:00:46] Right so it's like oh because...
[01:00:49] A victim of the fashion of being.
[01:00:51] Exactly not that you wrote a really weird story about an officer who's a terrible villain because...
[01:00:57] There was a time of emails where like there was this fantasy that you would write that email and the person would see that they were wrong and they would realize how they mistreated you.
[01:01:09] And like you know that's how that...
[01:01:12] I think in every age there's some sort of form where people can fantasize about that.
[01:01:19] His life seems to be all composed of that feeling that you have sometimes where if only you had thought of that sick burn at the moment.
[01:01:29] Right and you're just imagining you're replaying it in your mind over and over again.
[01:01:37] And like because he's alone and so that's all he has time to do.
[01:01:42] Yeah exactly.
[01:01:44] And he had enough money like inherited from some aunt and so he was able to quit his job and then now you know from part one it's just him and his thoughts and his guilt.
[01:01:59] Yeah it makes me afraid to ever live alone for long enough that I start...
[01:02:06] It's funny I was saying this in the Vertigo episode like there's that thing that it's capturing of just too much time on your hands.
[01:02:14] Wondering the streets but he hasn't even seemed to wander the streets that much.
[01:02:19] No and when he goes out he doesn't want to be says he doesn't want anybody to see him.
[01:02:25] He doesn't want to be recognized so he goes to places where he could be truly anonymous where it's like wait are there really places where you'd be recognized?
[01:02:33] If so then you're not that invisible.
[01:02:36] Can I read the last section?
[01:02:39] This is when he's describing why am I writing these notes what am I doing and he's saying I think we've now reached a point as human beings where real life is an effort and we've all privately agreed that it's better in books.
[01:02:56] And once we have freedom we'll want to be controlled and then once we're controlled too much we'll want to have independence.
[01:03:03] Then we'll have independence we'll beg to be under control and then he says and I know how you're going to act to this you're going to begin to shout and stamp your feet and now I'm quoting.
[01:03:13] Speak for yourself you will say and for your miseries and your underground holes but don't dare to say all of us.
[01:03:21] Excuse me gentlemen after all I do not mean to justify myself with that all of us as for what concerns me in particular I have only after all in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway and what's more you have taken your cowardice for good sense and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves so that perhaps after all there is more life in me than in you.
[01:03:46] Look into it more carefully after all we don't even know where living exists now what it is what it is called leave us alone without books and we will be lost in a confusion at once.
[01:03:58] We will not know what to join what to cling to what to love and what to hate what to respect and what to despise.
[01:04:05] We are even oppressed by being men men with real individual body and blood we are ashamed of it we think it's a disgrace and try to contrive some sort of impossible generalized man.
[01:04:17] We are still born and for many years we have not been begotten by living fathers and that suits us better and better we are developing a taste for it soon we shall somehow contrive to be born from an idea but enough I don't want to write more from underground.
[01:04:34] So it's I think that's a really interesting passage in light of part one like in part one he was proclaiming independence from what nature required of us and now he's complaining on the one hand he's complaining about the human beings tendency to generalize
[01:04:56] and to be ashamed of their individuality but in the same breath he's talking about what all human beings are like whether they admit it to themselves or not this is who they are so he's doing the very thing that he's accusing.
[01:05:12] Human beings of doing and at least in the first part claiming independence from and so he is contradicting himself in that last rant so starkly.
[01:05:25] Right.
[01:05:26] And then that's where Dusty Efsky's final note says the notes of this paradoxicalist do not end here however he could not resist and continued them but it also seems to me that we may stop him.
[01:05:41] And that's the end of the book.
[01:05:42] Yeah yeah I'd love that last note.
[01:05:45] What do you make of doing the notes like having the book ends of the two notes from a quote unquote Dusty Efsky.
[01:05:55] I like it because what it gives me is a so it's giving Dusty Efsky the ability to distance himself from the views that the underground man is espousing which for better or for worse makes me think of that underground man.
[01:06:17] As a character I don't know I can treat him as a character with thoughts without having to worry too much about how much of this Dusty Efsky is endorsing.
[01:06:32] Does that make sense?
[01:06:33] That's otherwise so personal.
[01:06:34] Exactly.
[01:06:35] It sounds like the like a journal entry.
[01:06:39] Right.
[01:06:40] Yeah.
[01:06:41] And I think he shares some of Dusty Efsky's ideas.
[01:06:44] Yeah I think Dusty Efsky is doing a good like I think that the ideas he's clearly endorsing some and clearly like say like pointing out like the fucking danger of some and without having without being moralistic about it he's just presenting these as notes from somebody else edge a whole bunch of ideas.
[01:07:06] Now what exactly does to Efsky's endorsing and what he's not part of it is I think it gives you the freedom of expressing.
[01:07:14] A germ of an idea that you may not really ever want to express in your real writing like he's playing around with some ideas that maybe have crossed his mind but he's rejected.
[01:07:27] Or he's worried about.
[01:07:28] Yeah.
[01:07:29] So he's creating a really nasty individual allowing himself to express ideas through this fairly nasty individual without getting attributed any of them to him.
[01:07:44] Yeah and also a way of sort of working out.
[01:07:48] I think Dusty Efsky has a if I had to guess an underground man side of him but also a side of him that is very wary of the views and the personality and this is a way of sort of getting both sides of himself out without taking a stand as to.
[01:08:14] You know which is right which is wrong which is yeah there is a way you know even referring to him as a paradoxicalist and creating this character.
[01:08:26] You know I think there is a deep truth that we all have these like real contradictions in ourselves like what we believe what we endorse I mean we think that anybody who's reflected on their own existence like it becomes pretty obvious that we we have these contradictions across the board it's like
[01:08:50] what it means to be human like it's your robot if you're so consistent and he's creating a person who is magnifying those paradoxes as a way to as a way to talk about him now normally like.
[01:09:03] You might if you write a story or a book you might create three or four different characters each who expresses something different and that's kind of what he does in the brothers cameras off in the brothers cameras off he's like okay I'll the OSHA represents this I've been represents
[01:09:17] and they argue with each other and you get the sense that dosi eskis working out his ideas through that dialogue here it's this cool literary tactic to make one kind of crazy person who is in on the one in one breath expressing one thing
[01:09:34] and another breath expressing another thing you know yeah right it's kind of cool.
[01:09:40] It's very cool there's no dialogue it except between the contradictions that are internal to the underground right right exactly and and I love that they are that I do love that we have zero idea how much of his interactions with the external world are accurately told
[01:10:01] and how much is just complete you know bullshit.
[01:10:06] We just don't know this is all the internal life of this person and I think it does add something in a way that could have been.
[01:10:13] Courtney but but wasn't to say that you found this right to like describe it as something that you found and Borges does this all the time I think that it adds some there's some feeling that it adds even though I know obviously dosi eskis wrote this he didn't actually find it there's a like.
[01:10:31] It gives it a reality like when when Borges makes up a bullshit book he says in this book this guy wrote this.
[01:10:37] It's different it feels different than just saying this right.
[01:10:43] So there's also and I think this is very emblematic of board for has like a meta textual element to it so you know it makes us aware in the way that we might not be if there weren't these footnotes that he is a character he is a character that's created and you know it's sort of ironic that.
[01:11:06] Dostoevsky starts out saying although their imaginary such persons as the writer of these notes not only may but positively must exist in our society again sort of playing that deterministic element that you know the people are bound to exist.
[01:11:23] In this fashion given the way society is and then that he just ends the notes even though they continue again the underground man I think I read this somewhere so but I don't remember where he is trapped as a fictional character by dosi eskis by his boundaries
[01:11:44] exactly and so he doesn't have it's another way of showing that he doesn't have independence right really interesting like the dosi eskis has himself decided when his story should start and when it should end.
[01:11:58] That was the thing that I think I came across I'm not smart enough to think of that myself but yeah that was that's really interesting.
[01:12:06] That's really nice.
[01:12:09] Yeah no I like the technique I'm not I'm not well versed in literature enough to know whether other people have you like you had used this technique before I assume people had.
[01:12:19] Yeah I'm sure people have ever since then but it's but it is just well done like just the thought that both it's constrained by dosi eskis but like also that we have somehow in our like this knowledge that oh by the way he kept rambling.
[01:12:34] He might have rambled for two pages he might have rambled for like a hundred more pages but like the guy couldn't stop himself and again it's this thing where this guy wants to be heard and he can't be and he was only heard when you know somebody else.
[01:12:48] So I think that the above allows him.
[01:12:53] So okay like.
[01:12:55] Tamler was your idea to read this and I hadn't read it like I said since college and as always the case like I end up enjoying it even more like after we discuss it but this is really.
[01:13:07] I really enjoyed it there's a lot in this there's a lot that is true about human nature in a way that I'm reminded like the reason I really like to see us before is like he just has this knack for understanding particular human psychology.
[01:13:24] So I don't relate at all to the underground guy.
[01:13:27] It's like his neuroses are a magnification of things that we experience all the time like did that guy really like he didn't move like it fucking bugged me that he didn't move when I was walking right toward him like why do I have to move right like we have that that happens to us but he's in magnifying
[01:13:43] it and giving us this neurotic paradoxical creature he's saying something about what it is like to be human in a way that like if I had to share with aliens like who could read I wanted him to get a sense of like the kind of bullshit that it is to live an everyday existence as a human being I might give him some of this.
[01:14:04] I totally agree like I would say you know with the caveat that it's not always this bad but seeing our neuroses at their worst moments this is what it's like and he's just an example of that as an entire character fortunately we have these other sides of us which enjoy companionship with friends and you know at least most of us do.
[01:14:31] I think there are people like this adapted for our age.
[01:14:38] Yeah I mean I also agree with you like I love this book and it's always I always appreciate these things more when we have a chance to discuss it.
[01:14:49] I think there's a lot of stuff we didn't tap into that we could like I think it's a really rich novel and there's stuff like just the stuff with the servant with Apple on and you know that like we haven't really talked about but I bet there's like a ton of interesting stuff.
[01:15:07] Yeah and we barely really talk about Liza we did not have a Liza in the yeah and that is that is sort of taking at the trope of the man who falls in love with the.
[01:15:17] The prostitute with the heart of gold and sort of turning it in into something different right it's in turning it into yeah something really really sad I mean you're really stuff is has its comic elements there's nothing comic about that part and I think it's you know it's the thing that makes this story so sad is a man who's just born.
[01:15:44] Not comfortable in his own skin and then just makes that his situation worse with every decision that he makes every interaction that he has and.
[01:15:56] At one point does something that he even considers unforgivable yeah and that he won't even attribute to being impelled like he says he backs off that he's like no I have to take responsibility for this for what I did when I put the money in her hand I have to take responsibility for that.
[01:16:16] And he can't forgive himself for that and he's constructed this whole philosophy which again I think I Dostoevsky has some sympathy with but he's he's constructed this whole philosophy as a way of dealing with his tragic life just why am I wired up like this.
[01:16:36] Why am I dealt this this particular hand and why did I play it so poorly especially at that particular moment that's.
[01:16:46] Right it's the the one.
[01:16:51] The one moment of regret and I think that it's such a powerful moment of regret not that he doesn't regret all of his other sort of you know like I wish that I had stood my ground with the right the street chicken.
[01:17:02] But the one thing that I think happens in his interaction with Liza is he he really treats all of the human beings as he's almost solipsistic.
[01:17:16] In that every other human being is a caricature and there's a moment where he realizes that Liza is a human being at some point he says so she too was capable of certain thoughts like he's like.
[01:17:28] Wow like this is a human being that has feelings and thoughts that are not unlike my own like it's his moment of actual empathy but before he knows it he's so caught up in the way that he acts before he knows that he fucks that up.
[01:17:40] Yeah you know.
[01:17:42] Totally and they have a moment of real love.
[01:17:45] Yeah.
[01:17:46] Yep.
[01:17:48] And he just was caught off guard by it and the one the one you know the one thing about being the experience of being a human being is.
[01:17:59] It is a little mind blowing to know that somebody else's.
[01:18:03] Life can be as complex and they as yours that other minds are have hopes and desires and fears and dreams and and they are you are not the only one and it seems as if he has that glimmer of it and then he fucks it up.
[01:18:23] And it's also the one time where somebody else that's vulnerable like I think he thinks of the.
[01:18:30] The you know those four friends at the dinner as Claude's but that you know like he can't harm them like there's nothing that he can do and he knows this to.
[01:18:43] Do anything more than just frustrate them and make them wish they didn't invite him but they he they're not vulnerable to anything that he can do but she was.
[01:18:54] And he took that power and he and he.
[01:18:56] That's right it's the first time he's ever been empowered in a way to affect someone else's life like he's lived his life lamenting that he has none of that power.
[01:19:07] And then when he had it he abused it in a terrible way.
[01:19:12] Right.
[01:19:13] Right.
[01:19:14] Even when he does have power like over his servant he just does he doesn't encoded as actually like another human being who he's screaming over.
[01:19:20] But he also doesn't seem to have power over the servant.
[01:19:22] The servant seems to have power over him.
[01:19:25] Right.
[01:19:26] Like he can't get rid of him.
[01:19:28] He wants to but he can't and the guy just like you know he just knows how to handle the underground man.
[01:19:37] It's like sometimes if I'm all worked up and my wife just doesn't acknowledge me.
[01:19:43] You know she's like she just like I'm going to let this pass.
[01:19:46] I'm going to let this pass.
[01:19:48] That's the most frustrating thing that anybody can do is just kind of stare placidly at me and you know you start to feel like a little kid.
[01:19:58] You start to feel like a little kid that's ranting and raving and then the parents are just kind of ignoring letting it pass and it's so frustrating as an adult.
[01:20:06] This is right.
[01:20:08] He's a victim.
[01:20:10] Poor Tamler the victim.
[01:20:13] He's a victim.
[01:20:14] All right so the 75% of our listeners who have not read just as I predicted read it with the notes from underground.
[01:20:25] And hopefully yeah that number has gone up.
[01:20:27] We did see it's short and it's definitely well worth reading.
[01:20:32] It is a uncomfortable but in a good way.
[01:20:36] Yeah.
[01:20:37] All right join us next time on Very Bedtime.
[01:20:45] Good man.
[01:20:58] Good man.
[01:20:59] With no more brains than you have.
[01:21:14] Anybody can have a brain?
[01:21:18] Very bad man.
[01:21:20] Very good man.
[01:21:22] Just a very bad wizard.