Subscriber Newsletter #09

Time flies when you spend more time in the real world and less time on screens. There are peaks and troughs on this stack, when I sometimes churn out 3 pieces a week out of compulsion or great interest in subject matter, then other times I feel utterly dejected and deflated just even looking at the news. I note that everyone I know is becoming fatigued by all the narratives. It’s emotionally and mentally draining to try and keep up with it all, with so many links to articles and podcasts being sent to me via chat apps, I’ve become much more selective in what kind of media I consume.

I’ve finished volume 2 of The Gulag Archipelago and will certainly be writing a post or two about that. For now, I just wish to share these two passages from the book, which have lingered in my mind for days:

In any case, among both prison and camp jailers it was possible to find human beings. Every prisoner encountered more than one in his career. In an officer it was virtually impossible. This, properly speaking, was the universal law of the inverse ratio between social position and humaneness.

Isn’t this absolutely relevant today? How and why those at the top of the pyramidal capstone of power are so devoid of feeling - that they pursue and gravitate towards a state of inhumaneness because they are dormant sociopaths.

The second passage describes the souls of the ‘zeks’ - the slang word used to describe the inmates of the soviet camps:

It is in this key that the views of the zeks on the Archipelago and on the life taking place in the space abutting on it must be perceived. Such a philosophy is the source of the zek's psychological stability. No matter how darkly circumstances may be stacked against him, he knits the brows of his rough and weathered face and says: "They cannot drop me any deeper than a mine." Or they comfort each other: "It could be worse."

And in reality, this conviction "It could be even worse!'~ clearly supports and encourages them in the most profound suffering of famine, cold, and spiritual depression. The zek is always expecting it to be worse. That is how he lives, constantly awaiting the blows of fate and stings of the evil spirit. And, on the other hand, he perceives every temporary relaxation as an oversight, a mistake. In this constant expectation of misfortune the austere soul of the zek matures, stoically hardened to its own fate, and pitiless toward the fates of others.

I found this fascinating and horrifying in equal measure, after reading about the constant betrayals in the gulag, as well as out in ‘freedom’, compounded by an expectation for things to get continually worse. That’s the paradox I think we are all in now. In my idealistic naivety in the early 2022 days of this stack, I used to write in the vein of things have to get worse before they get better but eventually we will win and there will be a new era of enlightenment…

Now I actually expect things to simultaneously get worse and also to get better. It is a strange state to be in. For example, I realise that life will get more dystopian with CBDC, digital ID push, surveillance, and so on. Yet I see Overton windows creaking wider open across the board, with more people questioning things - these types of conversations are happening with the most unlikely of people I encounter.

I am mostly upbeat because I am at peace with whatever is out of my control, and I no longer despair when those closest to me remain oblivious to most of reality. That’s alright. Enjoy the little things. Don’t sweat the stances and worldviews of others - they will get there in their own time, or maybe never at all.