Don't survive contact with reality.

In 1868, Dostoevsky created a disturbing literary experiment.

He placed a man incapable of malice in the middle of Russian high society to see what would happen.

Spoiler. The world completely destroyed him.

And maybe that explains why you feel so tired of trying to be decent. Dostoevsky had a bold

and almost impossible literary project. He wanted to create what he called a positively good

man, not a stained glass saint abstracted from human reality,

not a moral parable character who exists only to illustrate an edifying lesson,

but a real human being functioning in the concrete world with genuine kindness as a central

and irremovable personality trait. Prince Lev Nikolayevich Mishkin returns to Russia after years institutionalized in a Swiss sanatorium

treating severe epilepsy.

He never studied networking.

He doesn't master the social games we learn in childhood, calculating advantages in every interaction.

For us it's automatic. for him impossible. He's simply

incapable of malice in the same way you or I are incapable of flying by willpower. Notice

the word I chose, incapable. Not chooses not to be malicious as an exercise in moral development,

not tries to be good as a self-improvement project

you start in January and abandon in March. He literally can't think in terms of manipulation,

strategic advantage, social lies necessary to preserve harmony or protect status. When he meets

someone for the first time, he sees a complete human being.

When someone tells a story, he believes by default, without the protective cynicism we all develop.

When he witnesses suffering, he feels automatic, reflexive compassion without going through the internal filters of, does this person deserve my empathy, or, will helping here cost me something I don't want to pay?

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