One may stand perplexed before some thought, especially seeing men's sin, asking oneself,

shall I take it by force or by humble love? Always resolve to take it by humble love.

If you so resolve once and for all, you will be able to overcome the whole world.

A loving humility is a terrible power, the most powerful of all. Nothing compares with it.

All right, you know, I was going to start this episode by reading an excerpt from some stupid article

and I think it was like the economist or something and it was, it said something like the headline was

yes, Russian literature is tainted with imperialism. And it's one of those ones that you knew

this article was going to come out at some point because there's all this argument going on about

whether we should quote unquote, cancel Dostoevsky, cut him off of our reading lists and not teach him

in universities because of, you know, Putin's terrible aggression against Ukraine, right? And this,

you know, I, as you know, agree that Putin's aggression against Ukraine is terrible, but like,

I think, most sensible people of various political persuasions, I find this argument completely

absurd, not only because, you know, Dostoevsky lived more than a hundred years before the Putin

invasion, but also, of course, because of the whole concept that you might need to scrub certain

great works out of the canon because they have, you know, ideas that, you know, maybe like the

implications of or indeed, perhaps maybe there are some bad ideas, you know, right? Like we did

talk at one point, for instance, about Mike Disagreement who they're talking about the nature of

the human soul, right? But I was insisting at that point and I insist now that it would be

completely self-defeating and enormous self-own to develop or to cultivate in oneself that allergy

to bad ideas like, ooh, don't want to be contaminated, don't want to get near it, right? This is a,

you know, preposterous in self-defeating in so many ways and it's especially preposterous,

of course, when we're up against one of the great novelists, if not the great novelist, of the

...