Totalitarian Novels: Loyalty and Confession in Darkness at Noon
The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Hillsdale College
4.6 • 621 Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss the nature of loyalty before introducing Hillsdale College president Dr. Larry P. Arnn.
Totalitarian novels depict regimes that exert complete and pervasive control over the lives of their subjects. George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, and C.S. Lewis imagine the terrible possibilities of unchecked modern tyranny. Join Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale College students in this exploration of 1984, Brave New World, Darkness at Noon, and That Hideous Strength.
The course includes four lectures and four conversations, each about 30 minutes long. It is structured with one lecture about each book followed by a conversation between Dr. Arnn and the students about themes from that book.
Despite his regrets, Rubashov has corrupted himself to the point that he eventually doubts his righteousness, willingly confesses to his sham crimes, and accepts punishment from the Party.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I am Jeremiah Regan. |
| 0:14.9 | And I'm Juan Davalos. We are back today with totalitarian novels. Lecture number six, |
| 0:20.0 | Darkness at noon, loyalty and confession. |
| 0:23.2 | Yeah, so Dr. Arn gave us a plot summary and explored some of the themes of Arthur Kersler's |
| 0:27.6 | Darkness at Noon in our last lecture. Now we have a conversation with the students, and they ask |
| 0:33.2 | some intelligent and interesting questions. I think we'll skip to their final question, which might be the most important. |
| 0:39.9 | Why does Rubishov confess at his show trial to crimes that he knows he didn't commit? |
| 0:45.0 | Which is very interesting, like we've said before in a previous course, we've talked about |
| 0:51.1 | Solzhenitsyn in the work that he did with the Gulag Archipelago. |
| 0:55.8 | And he actually also brings up this question in his writings. |
| 0:59.6 | He says, why do people confess to crimes that they don't commit? |
| 1:04.8 | And there is an amount of tyranny that is brought up to people where they get to a point that they just simply |
| 1:13.1 | confess. And in fact, he, it also needs to recount a time when he heard some Russian soldiers |
| 1:21.3 | speaking and actually mocking Nazi soldiers for having allowed somebody to leave a confession room without confessing |
| 1:31.0 | to a crime they didn't commit. This is not a new phenomenon either. Socrates decides to confess |
| 1:36.9 | to his crimes and accept his punishment. And he gives us through Plato and through Xenophon |
| 1:41.6 | long accounts of why he made the decision he did. |
| 1:49.5 | But one of the things Xenophon especially brings out is there's no way out for Socrates. |
| 1:53.6 | He is old. He has nowhere to go. Even if he tried a daring escape, he wouldn't be accepted anywhere else. And you think some of these factors have to weigh in on a character like Rubikov. |
| 1:58.1 | He knows he's been a party member since its inception. He knows there's |
| 2:01.9 | no way out. And so why not accept the punishment of his party, which upholds the legitimacy |
| 2:09.0 | of his party, the legitimacy of the thing to which he's devoted his entire life. There's kind of |
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