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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Existentialism)

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

DailyWire+

Education, Science, Society & Culture

4.634.5K Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2020

⏱️ 74 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

--From: 2014 Personality Lecture 13: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Existentialism)-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, perhaps the greatest Russian author of the twentieth century, was an Orthodox Christian existentialist, a direct descendant of Dostoevsky's thinking, and a man who took a mighty axe to the terrible tangled roots of communist totalitarianism. He associated inauthentic being on the part of the individual, within society, with the direct degeneration of that society into tyranny and malevolence. -- For Advertising Inquiries, visit https://www.advertisecast.com/TheJordanBPetersonPodcast

Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm going to read you something that he wrote.

0:05.0

I'm going to try to tell you today why the events in the 20th century happen.

0:12.0

So, the map that I wrote was a part of,

0:16.0

and I'm going to try to tell you something that I wrote.

0:22.0

I'm going to try to tell you today why the events in the 20th century

0:27.0

happen, so the mass genocidal movements in particular,

0:31.0

which were probably the defining characteristic of the 20th century.

0:35.0

And then also what that has to do with individual psychology.

0:40.0

My first degree was in political science, and I was interested in political science

0:44.0

because I was interested fundamentally in the reason that human societies went to war.

0:49.0

And when I was studying political science, which is quite a long time ago,

0:53.0

the fundamental theory that underlie political scientists' explanations for conflict

0:59.0

were economic.

1:00.0

People fight over resources, and that never seemed reasonable to me because,

1:06.0

first of all, obviously, many wars are fought for other reasons than resources.

1:11.0

Two Central American countries, I think it was Guatemala and the Honduras,

1:15.0

if I remember correctly, went to war over a soccer game.

1:19.0

So the outcome of a disputed outcome of a soccer game.

1:24.0

And even if you do think that the reason that groups of people engage in conflict

1:29.0

are for economic reasons, that doesn't exactly explain much because

1:33.0

that doesn't explain whether they're fighting for,

1:37.0

because of absolute differences in wealth, or because of relative discrepancies in wealth,

...

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