I don't know if anyone is a big fan of Dostoevsky, but his books are simply brilliant. The brothers Karamazov being one of the best allegorical wrestles with morality, Crime and Punishment on the impact of sin upon a person's conscience, and the Idiot about how society tries to pull down innocence.

Outside of the big 3, Demons (or Devils) is sometimes considered his next most profound work, and I think its shortchanged a little bit. In all of Dostoevsky's three other books, there is typical Russian pessimism leavened with with the hope bolstered by his Russian Orthodox beliefs; Demons is just all pessimism.

It's easy to see why, at the time Demons was written the Russian Empire had just started it's heavy flirtation with Godless Marxism and nihilism aided and abetted by an out of touch and decadent aristocracy.

The novel looks at a few main characters: Stepan Trofimovich (the old limousine liberal), Pyotr Stepanovich (the new antifa-liberal bomb thrower, Stepan's son), Nikolai Stavrogin (the rich young aristocrat) and Alexey Kirillov (the young nihilist)

Stepan Trofimovich lives off the patronage of Nikolai's mother, and is an aged liberal playboy who had a few poems and articles of little renown decades ago that he's managed to milk into a soft life. He longs for a day when Communism reigns and the Orthodox church can be marginalized, all while living the soft life that the Aristocracy and Church have created. He represents the old liberals, the Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi type. His son Pyotr, is the new radicals, he wants to burn the churches down, kill the clergy, and rape and pillage the aristocracy in order to implement Marxism by force: these are the AOC's, the DSA's and antifa. They hate the old limousine liberals almost as much as they hate the aristocracy and the Church for being lukewarm. Nikolai has a lot of very deep thoughts and fakes kidness but is such a slave to his base passions that he doesn't actually do anything other than live a life of debauchery, the prodigal son who never returns. Alexey is a very well educated engineer, who has educated himself so much that he's convinced himself the only true way to be free is to kill himself, and sets about to do just that.

This book was written 150 years ago, and reminds me very much of the situation we find ourselves in at this moment. You've got the old liberals trying to change the system from within, the new liberals trying to burn the system down and replace it in their own image, the youth too blinded by porn, booze, weed, and other stimuli to see what's actually happening, and the educated convinced that life means nothing and suicide is the best alternative.

Really hope we can have some people who have read this let me know their thoughts

Thank you for writing this. it makes me want to pick up the book.

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I read a lot. And I mean a lot.

But I have never found myself overly interested in reading Dostoevsky for the exact reasons you mentioned. I don't think I can continue to peck away at that much hopelessness.

I've been watching Aggie football for the last 40 years and I just can't take anymore.

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That's a good point

Here is the money shot in Demons related to your topic:

Quote:

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Quote:
It's a sign of the decay of nations when they begin to have gods in common. When gods begin to be common to several nations the gods are dying and the faith in them, together with the nations themselves. The stronger a people the more individual their God. There never has been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of good and evil. Every people has its own conception of good and evil, and its own good and evil. When the same conceptions of good and evil become prevalent in several nations, then these nations are dying, and then the very distinction between good and evil is beginning to disappear.

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America ceases to exist without American Exceptionalism, which has a core to it that is based in Judeo/Christian principles, the sanctity of the individual as the most important political unit, and that productivity of the individual is a public good and has value to society which should be rewarded by the rules you set up in the society.

The rich people of the world, including most of the insanely rich in America, hate American Exceptionalism, because it gets in the way of a global hegemony and creates a potential threat to the established generational control that the global aristocracy enjoys. The best way to kill that idea is to attack Judeo/Christian values and Christianity itself, and to attack the ideas around patriotic capitalism that recognizes the common good of individual productivity.

What we are seeing now in MAGA is a return to the idea that individual rights and the God-ordained innate value of the individual are ideals that are worth fighting for, even if they are values that America alone will be able to continue to champion. We have tried since 1980 to convince the world that the American way of life is the one that leads to the best outcomes, but we have routinely been rejected by cultures that lacked the ambition and drive-to-excellence that fuels the mix of hard work, individuality, and calculated risk taking that has made the American society the most potent source of economic growth that mankind has ever known.

America is fairly unique in that our collective heritage does not come from a historical tie to race, geography, or religion, but to the unique and revolutionary ideas that were proclaimed as divinely ordained by our forefathers. These ideas have proven themselves to be the brightest path to organizing any society that is run and managed by curators whose wills and desires are formed out of the crooked timber of humanity. We are tied together by the primacy of the ideal that all persons, regardless of heritage, race, social status, or geographic origin, have the same innate value and should be subject to the same rules, laws and ethical standards in their worldly pursuits.

These ideals are under attack from all angles by many enemies. We are encouraged to abandon the foundational and unique ideas of individual agency and divinely imported worth that bind us together as a nation. We are harassed and manipulated through suggestion to reallocate of the value of the individual from divine appointment and individual societal contribution towards a focus on the degree of support the individual communicates to the subjugating directives of the national institutions. These institutions, once powerful conduits of unifying ethea and endeavors now radiate ideals designed to segregate us along any line imaginable to avoid the nation from rallying around the core principles of our national heritage. We are scolded that our pride in our exceptional accomplishments is somehow rude and the deeds somehow unworthy of the effort required to achieve them, because that pride somehow diminishes the distinction of the lesser accomplishments of our global neighbors.

Make zero mistake my fellow Americans, the very Gods and foundations of this nation are under attack simultaneously on two sides: by the powerful elite which wish to proclaim the arrival to their station provides supremacy over them, and envious individuals that find ideas celebrating laborious diligence too foreign to their heritage to adopt or too costly to their leisurely comfort to support. It is much easier to claim value to society through the degree of loyalty you are willing to provide to the aristocracy than it is to claim value in the effort expended striving towards accomplishments of societal worth.

But, I don't share the pessimism of many of my peers to the plight of America, even if we are currently on shaky ground. The recent advances in technology allow exponentially greater impact of the effort of a few determined people to cut into the heart of the leviathan, which will struggle to react nimbly due to her bloated size and the insatiable selfish appetite of her members. In the end, I truly believe that the technologies that society is trying to use to drive fear into the hearts of this nation will be turned to shine brilliant sunshine on the corrupt cancer infecting the machinations of our society, and turned too quickly, brightly, and suddenly for the inerrant to hide from it.

TL;DR, the aristocracy of this nation is getting spoiled, complacent and lack a healthy level of fear of the American people for it to be sustainable. The advancements in technology is going to enable a small cadre of determined and talented men to eventually throw them all out. The worm will not turn slowly, but suddenly and violently before leading to a long and bloody struggle. We have done it before, and we can do it again.

I was inspired to pull my copy out and start over.